Skip to main content

Solved! The mystery of the dissappearing app tabs.

App tabs is a lovely feature of Firefox 4. It allows you to sticky tabs turning them into small icons on the left hand side of your tab bar. Firefox will remember your stickied tabs between sessions.  I make gmail an app tab for example and every time I run Firefox there is the gmail tab waiting for me unobtrusively in the top left hand corner of my screen. I find the feature less obtrusive and yet more useful than the speed dial feature in Opera because you don't have ot go to the home page to get your frequently used tabs.

Unfortunately the current incarnation of app tabs don't seem to be as sticky as you would like them to be.One issue is that they start up to the last page you viewed in the tab rather than your chosen page. The app tab for Gmail for example is likely to show you the email you were reading the last time you shut down Firefox.  Another annoyance is that Firefox sync doesn't sync app tabs between different computers. The most infuriating feature however is that Firefox regularly seems to forget all my app tabs forcing me to set them up all over again.

Until today I couldn't figure out why this was happening. Most of the time app tabs worked great but once every few days I would open the browser to find my special tabs gone. Searching on google pointed to the fact that Firefox stores its app tabs in recent browser history and the clear history button also wipes app tabs. While this is not ideal it is not the cause of my disappearing tabs because I never clear my browser history. Today I finally stumbled across the explanation in this post on Mozilla forums.

The answer relates to the fact that Firefox stores the last state of your app tabs every time you close down. If you open multiple browser windows then it will only remember your app tabs if the last window you close has the app tabs. I use two monitors on my computer and occasionally I will spawn a second browser window to compare pages side by side. Only the main window has app tabs. If I close the main window first and the daughter window last then all my app tabs disappear.

Now that I know why this happens I can hopefully remember not to do it again but I do think it would be better if app tabs were defined in a more permanent way. If I can find a useful way of making this suggestion on Mozilla's forums I will.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein...
53 comments
Read more

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p...
1 comment
Read more

Lotro: The Forgotten Treasury

Throg joined a Kinship group for the Forgotten Treasury instance last night. It was an enjoyable change from the solo questing that the now level 55 dwarf champion has been mostly doing so far in Moria. Some members of the group had tried and failed to clear the Treasury before so we knew it would be challenging but we were lucky enough to have a well balanced group with Guardian, Minstrel, Lore Master, Hunter, Burglar and Champion (Throg). Throg (level 55) and the minstrel (53) were both below the 56ish level of the instance but the others were all higher so it more or less balanced out. [SPOILERs ahead] It is a well designed enjoyable instance set in a circular chamber with balcony around. As you enter, a boss absconds to a locked side chamber with his treasure leaving the fellowship to clear trash ringed around the balcony. Once the trash are cleared you have access to a puzzle which must be solved in order to open the locked door. Clearing the (including six mini bosses) also get...
14 comments
Read more