Reviews for Tab Stash
Tab Stash by Josh Berry
Review by Thomas Leon Highbaugh
Rated 5 out of 5
by Thomas Leon Highbaugh, 3 years agoI have used this extensions in the past, it was the same then as now, but have tried two different options as alternatives as I wanted to see if something better existed, taking 3 months to come back to this extension.
My issue prompting the 3 month sabbatical was that the stashed tabs, which I want to manage and keep more groomed and under control, quickly grow way out of my capacity to manage. Yet neither alternative I tried was able to reliably save tabs (which in code is easy enough to implement storage as plain text list of tabs I would think) and Tab Stash not only can reliably keep the list of tabs between reboots, but it even can restore lists between installs or on different machines reliably.
So yes, the tab list is harder to manage than I would prefer, click the tab and its gonna reopen and the buttons are fickle to get to press (dev could increase there size and create a transparent outline in the css that is 3px or greater to alleviate this). My other minor gripes is I hate when the sidebar opens itself for any reason, I use a modified firefox which I have bolted userChrome.js loaders into the system-wide application directory that load custom toolbars on all four sides of my screen and don't use the native sidebar for any purpose ever, preferring extensions placed on the vertical toolbar opposite of my custom rolled vertical tab solution, which is all pushed to the side by the native sidebar, which amounts to 2 seconds of additional work until I determine how to disable the native sidebar with either CSS or JS and is hardly an actual issue for me just annoying. The other minor gripe is am a fan of monochromatic (mostly) window styling and am unaware of the class/id names to modify the color of the fickle little buttons, which are not the most horrid colors, but still if the sidebar must be out sometimes, I would prefer the buttons be just the icon or gray. But that's me, not everyone cares and most probably like the colors so I don't fault anyone for any of that and will not remove any stars over any of it.
This extension only seems to save tabs to a list and then backups it up with the sync service provided by firefox, so reviews talking about it eating RAM make little sense and even a crude tab suspender will effectively provide a mitigation against such (at least on Linux which does not itself have much hardware overhead wasted on telemetry like a certain popular OS does, which I can't speak for as I haven't used anything but linux in 6 years). Additionally CPU usage makes no sense considering the extension only does anything at all at the point the user stashes their tabs, which itself should not cause any issue on modern hardware on any platform, but maybe there is some specific issue that the Redmond special causes there I would be happily unaware of on my customized distro where the system does nothing I do not tell it to do.
If the popup menu or sidebar doesn't appear as someone has seemed to indicate, then the issue is probably with the about:config setting or some other unrelated configuration that is easily restored to default in about:config and definitely not a problem with this configuration which seems to do a relatively simple task well and its up to me to stay on top of it but its the only reliable tab manager I have used on modern firefox, works even with my specific setup and stays out of my way, aka does require messing with container naming while handling multiple windows beautifully and has no performance impact (on Linux at least) that I have ever noticed making it a default I will keep coming back to.
Great work developer!
My issue prompting the 3 month sabbatical was that the stashed tabs, which I want to manage and keep more groomed and under control, quickly grow way out of my capacity to manage. Yet neither alternative I tried was able to reliably save tabs (which in code is easy enough to implement storage as plain text list of tabs I would think) and Tab Stash not only can reliably keep the list of tabs between reboots, but it even can restore lists between installs or on different machines reliably.
So yes, the tab list is harder to manage than I would prefer, click the tab and its gonna reopen and the buttons are fickle to get to press (dev could increase there size and create a transparent outline in the css that is 3px or greater to alleviate this). My other minor gripes is I hate when the sidebar opens itself for any reason, I use a modified firefox which I have bolted userChrome.js loaders into the system-wide application directory that load custom toolbars on all four sides of my screen and don't use the native sidebar for any purpose ever, preferring extensions placed on the vertical toolbar opposite of my custom rolled vertical tab solution, which is all pushed to the side by the native sidebar, which amounts to 2 seconds of additional work until I determine how to disable the native sidebar with either CSS or JS and is hardly an actual issue for me just annoying. The other minor gripe is am a fan of monochromatic (mostly) window styling and am unaware of the class/id names to modify the color of the fickle little buttons, which are not the most horrid colors, but still if the sidebar must be out sometimes, I would prefer the buttons be just the icon or gray. But that's me, not everyone cares and most probably like the colors so I don't fault anyone for any of that and will not remove any stars over any of it.
This extension only seems to save tabs to a list and then backups it up with the sync service provided by firefox, so reviews talking about it eating RAM make little sense and even a crude tab suspender will effectively provide a mitigation against such (at least on Linux which does not itself have much hardware overhead wasted on telemetry like a certain popular OS does, which I can't speak for as I haven't used anything but linux in 6 years). Additionally CPU usage makes no sense considering the extension only does anything at all at the point the user stashes their tabs, which itself should not cause any issue on modern hardware on any platform, but maybe there is some specific issue that the Redmond special causes there I would be happily unaware of on my customized distro where the system does nothing I do not tell it to do.
If the popup menu or sidebar doesn't appear as someone has seemed to indicate, then the issue is probably with the about:config setting or some other unrelated configuration that is easily restored to default in about:config and definitely not a problem with this configuration which seems to do a relatively simple task well and its up to me to stay on top of it but its the only reliable tab manager I have used on modern firefox, works even with my specific setup and stays out of my way, aka does require messing with container naming while handling multiple windows beautifully and has no performance impact (on Linux at least) that I have ever noticed making it a default I will keep coming back to.
Great work developer!
Developer response
posted 3 years agoThanks for the review and the feedback! I will keep in mind your point about the buttons being too small and the preference for less color.
The sidebar can be controlled (to a certain extent) in Tab Stash's preferences. However there are some situations (e.g. on an extension update) where Firefox will just decide to open the sidebar and the add-on has no control over this.
Hope this helps, and I'm glad to hear you're enjoying it!
The sidebar can be controlled (to a certain extent) in Tab Stash's preferences. However there are some situations (e.g. on an extension update) where Firefox will just decide to open the sidebar and the add-on has no control over this.
Hope this helps, and I'm glad to hear you're enjoying it!