sidebery: Panels and movement of tabs: tabs sometimes disappear and/or or inexplicably move to the wrong panel

I don’t yet know how to make this consistently reproducible, sorry.

My early sense of things is that the bug begins to bite after moving a tab, or multiple tabs, from the Default panel to any other panel.

Steps to reproduce

Maybe … with multiple windows open, and three panels in one window, move tabs from Default to other panels e.g.

/r/privacy
/r/privacytoolsIO

Expected behavior

Move only the tabs that were selected.

Actual behavior

Eventually, realise that tabs are missing from the Default panel.

I <strike>almost certainly </strike>might have moved only one or two tabs to /r/privacytoolsIO but now there are 34, many of which are unexpected new tabs.

I <strike>almost certainly </strike>might have moved more than a few tabs to /r/privacy but now there’s just one, a new tab.

Most (hopefully all) of the tabs that seem to be missing from their proper panels seem to be misplaced (in the wrong panel).

Unexpected new tabs seem to arise through simply switching from one panel to another.

Where a previously listed tab is no longer listed in any panel: this may be worked around by using the sidebar menu to switch away from, then back to, Sidebery.

Screenshots

Here, for example, before the bug bit I had a relatively long list of tabs:

2020-02-28 01:56:10

Here’s an example of a tab that I did not move from Default, misplaced under /r/privacytoolsIO:

Screen recording

2020-02-28 01:56.zip

Wild guess

Might the leading / (slash, solidus) be a problem?

Environment info

4.6.0
Firefox 73.0.1 (64-bit)
FreeBSD-CURRENT.

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created 4 years ago
Comments: 39 (9 by maintainers)

Commits related to this issue

Fixed: Moving tabs between panels (#147) — committed to mbnuqw/sidebery by mbnuqw 4 years ago

Most upvoted comments

Re: #171 can wrongness (in the context of e.g. Sidebery panels) also occur through use of standard keyboard shortcuts for movement? Yes unfortunately, if the tab was moved from one panel to another (e.g. as showed in the scheme above) it will cause an error.

The situation is aggravated by the fact that visually it may seem that everything is normal, but with each new action (tab creation, removing, activation etc…) errors will be layered.

So, unfortunately, until I’ll add some mechanism to auto-fix the tabs/panels structure after external changes Sidebery won’t work correctly in multi- panel mode.

mbnuqw on Mar 22, 2020

@grahamperrin thanks for more details. Could you please also post here list of enabled extensions? Because I cannot reproduce this with the same settings on clear Firefox profile.

Note: I’ve already started to check some popular addons compatibility and found that Sidebery and TreeStyleTab incompatible (only one can be enabled) since both handle position of new tab.

mbnuqw on Mar 14, 2020

Fixed. Thanks

Dook1 on Mar 6, 2020

@grahamperrin, sorry for the slow response. You can try to delete the “prevTabsData_v4” and then “tabsData_v4” in the “Storage” section in the settings page. This will reset the tab - panel relation.

The root of this issue I think is the wrong tabs order or/and wrong the tab - panel relation. Schematic representation of possible issue:

Example of correct layout of tabs:

Panel A | Tab a1
        | Tab a2
        | Tab a3
----------------
Panel B | Tab b1
        | Tab b2
        | Tab b3


Example of incorrect layout of tabs:

Panel A | Tab a1
        | Tab a2
        | Tab b1
        | Tab a3
----------------
Panel B | Tab b2
        | Tab b3

Because of this, Sidebery is very sensitive to the order of tabs and as a result, any extensions that can move tabs can contribute to this problem.

As a possible workaround, you can opt out of additional panels and use only the default one. You can also disable moving new tabs screenshot-2020-03-21 20:40:16

and switch to “session storage” screenshot-2020-03-21 20:40:36

I’ll try to write validator to detect incorrect tabs position and hopefully this and other (e.g. #171) issues will be fixed.

mbnuqw on Mar 21, 2020

Alright, v4.6.1 is uploaded. @Dook1, @grahamperrin could you check this behavior, please?

mbnuqw on Mar 3, 2020

Looks like I’ve finally can reproduce bug with moving tabs between panels. This is not a conflict of some addons but a problem with moving/state updating logic. I’ll update add-on ASAP.

mbnuqw on Mar 3, 2020

AutocopySelection2Clipboard Duplicate Tabs Closer Last Visited Toolip Link Status Redux OurStickys - Sticky Notes on every page Session Boss StickyNotes Swift Selection Search Tab Mover Tabs manager uBlock Origin Unclose@Dook UnloadTabs@Dook Window Titler

Dook1 on Mar 1, 2020

I confirm this problem. When you move multiple tabs (selected tabs) between panels, they are sometimes lost. Turning the sidebar off and on helps return them.

Dook1 on Feb 29, 2020

Thank you for the details. It seems like the problem is lying in the storing of panels state. Could you provide the value of property “panels_v4” in storage. To get this info, go to the settings page, scroll to section “Storage” and click on “open” against the “panels_v4” label. After that you can try to delete this property and check if the issue (this and #148) still present.

p.s. sorry for long responses and many thanks for helping in debugging these issues.

mbnuqw on Feb 29, 2020