Reviews for Session Boss
Session Boss by William Wng
Review by oehmsmith
Rated 2 out of 5
by oehmsmith, 6 years agoI've found good tab managers hard to find. This is one I settled on for FF since it has the functionality I'm looking for (I like to have lots of windows and tabs open). I would give it 5 stars for this reason. There are some bugs like the tabs that have the title but no URL. William W said it is due to the Lazy loading. But it doesn't always happen that way. So its a bug. I see the comment about FF 63+ fixes this. Perhaps it is and i haven't noticed. I'll be sure to look for this now. I appreciate a developer's time writing these addons. It must be tough to receive negative feedback. Kudos for putting it out there. A star is lost for saying "- In fact, the source used to have a GPL license. I've just changed it to closed source because of this review.". Not cool. It looses 2 stars because it has permission to "Access your data for all websites", which from my understanding could include passwords typed in to pages. I understand the Mozilla review process is sound though one still needs to ask why you need this permission. If anything William you need to state the reason why. I would think only "Access browser tabs" permissions are required. Sorry to give what started as a good review only 2 stars.
Developer response
posted 6 years agoAppreciate the reviews. It takes time and effort to write them. I don't mind the low rating and criticism. The feedback help to address some of the shortcomings of the project. What I don't like is people using rating as a hostage hijacking tool to make demand. I changed the license from GPL to closed source for the exact reason. People feel very entitled to open source projects, think they "own" them, and can make demand to the developers. Really, the open source developers owe nobody nothing. They already donate their time, effort, and creation to the public; they don't need more headache. Making it closed source stops all these trouble.
I understand your concern about the permissions and I will spend some time to review the need for the permissions to see if they can be cut back (that would entail a time consuming process of turning off each permission and see what breaks). From what I remember, the "Access your data for all websites" permission was needed to run script on the webpages to set the URL to load the page, for lazy page loading. Also the "cookies" permission will prompt the same message. Access to cookies is needed to get the container "cookieStoreId" property, for saving and restoring container setting of the tabs.
I understand your concern about the permissions and I will spend some time to review the need for the permissions to see if they can be cut back (that would entail a time consuming process of turning off each permission and see what breaks). From what I remember, the "Access your data for all websites" permission was needed to run script on the webpages to set the URL to load the page, for lazy page loading. Also the "cookies" permission will prompt the same message. Access to cookies is needed to get the container "cookieStoreId" property, for saving and restoring container setting of the tabs.
132 reviews
- Rated 1 out of 5by SedUz, 3 months agoDoesn't work at all. This extension is useless and can't save any session. Doesn't support private windows and GUI is buggy.
I don't get it what you have updated there 3 months ago, but it simply doesn't work. - Rated 5 out of 5by bege1, 5 months agoI recommend this session manager rather than the one that Mozilla recommends.
Session Boss saves sessions automatically when changes happen, not in a fix time schedule. No unnecessary backups and nothing gets lost.
You can decide whether to keep or remove the current tabs right when restoring a session. It is not bound to a fix setting.
I am very contented with this session manager. - Rated 1 out of 5by Rujin parker, 8 months agoTL;DR The extension current state as of 11-Jul-24 is slow, functionally insufficient, visually unappealing, & Unreliable.
Session Boss is a poorly executed session manager that hinders user experience due to performance bottlenecks, feature deficiencies, and an outdated design & interface. infact it's a prime e.g. why people flee to better tab managing browsers ecosystems (chromium native support for tab management is not great but the extension support to manipulate the behavior makes up for it)
The extension's performance issues are particularly egregious when dealing with large numbers of tabs. A session with 1,500 tabs took over 30 agonizing minutes to restore using Session Boss. In contrast, Firefox's native solution (about:sessionrestore) accomplished the same feat in mere seconds. takes a minute or 2 to completely do its job of restoring the tabs with their associated groups in the tree style tab with no laggy experience at all. Otherwise it does what it suppose to do. backs up your tabs & its structure by both on schedule & change basis but in order to do that it consumes too much CPU making your browsing miserable. i.e. not optimized for a session manager.
Furthermore, the extension's performance woes extend beyond session restoration. General browsing becomes sluggish, and video playback is plagued by stuttering and lag. & worse it makes tree style tab slow & laggy. which makes it even more frustrating.
Session Boss boasts a feature set that can only be described as rudimentary. It's as if the developer took a core concept and then deliberately stripped it down to its bare bones.
- Basic Operations: The extension lacks fundamental capabilities like selecting multiple tabs for moving, copying, cutting, pasting tabs between sessions, and merging or splitting sessions. These are essential functions for any modern session manager.
-- Duplicate Tabs: Identifying and managing duplicate tabs is a nightmare. There's no built-in mechanism to distinguish between identical tabs, let alone group or remove them.
-- Import/Export: A critical omission is the absence of robust import/export options. The extension cannot import session data from popular alternatives like Chrome's TabXpert or Firefox's Tab Session Manager, nor can it utilize Firefox's native backup files (.jsonlz4, .baklz4). also, Non-existent CSV support. This limitation hampers user experience and restricts data transfer capabilities. & also significantly reduces the extension's utility.
- Organization: Session Boss offers no tools for organizing tabs within a session. There's no option to sort tabs by domain, URL, title, or most recently used. After searching for tabs, there is no way to select and manage multiple tabs across different sessions. This makes managing large numbers of tabs an exercise in frustration.
Coming down to the user interface of Session Boss is outdated and visually unappealing as already said above. It clashes with Firefox's modern design language, creating a jarring and unprofessional look. The extension's slow response times (specifically when deleting the sessions) exacerbate the overall poor user experience. I suggest the Dev. to take a look at partizion.io & tabXpert both of them are great session manager & tab manager in every way. Performance wise, UI/UX wise, Feature Wise, Support wise. plz give them a look.
Data Loss: The extension exhibited alarming instability during testing. In one instance, all saved sessions were mysteriously deleted after a system crash. This is an unacceptable level of unreliability for a session manager. Session Boss's on-change basis and scheduled saving functions conflict, causing delays and additional issues. Re-enabling the extension after disabling it resulted in losing all session data & making the extension unresponsive.
As it stands, this extension is in its infancy and requires extensive work before it can be considered a viable session manager for daily use. - Rated 2 out of 5by Jay, a year agoIt does fine in remembering the tabs and windows I saved but when i backup a session and try to reopen it it only opens 10-50% of the tabs i had open, and i have to do the rest manually.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18285282, a year agoBetter than session buddy, the best session manager
Edit: LIMITED SESSION SAVES - 2 THUMBS DOWN - Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18187107, a year agoUsed to work fine until it randomly decided to wipe all my tabs. Nothing could be recovered. Stay away!
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 17861056, 2 years agoAmazing. Best alternative to Session Buddy in Firefox. Supports Tree Style Tabs also. Perfect! I wish it could also restore favicons.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 16024671, 2 years agoVery good, saved me several times. It should be kept up-to-date. Automatic Scheduled Exports would be nice...
- Rated 2 out of 5by Mata, 2 years ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by Shenandoah, 2 years ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by laurentparis, 2 years agoUsed to work ok but today ALL my saved user sessions simply vanished. With no apparent means to recover them. Thousands of tabs lost.
- Rated 2 out of 5by dafFDasd, 3 years agoHas option to open full page view as default. But no closing tabs nor windows is possible.
- Rated 4 out of 5by Seak T. F., 3 years agoEverything (GUI, etc) is nice. Except that it seems like it's unable to sync across computer, right?
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14983551, 3 years agoIntially had the the problem off rare moments where all User sessions would get deleted from a crash or update. Incredible plugin though, i love it. Just make sure you get into the habit of always exporting (backing up) all your user sessions few times a week. Nevetheless, perfect plugin.
- Rated 4 out of 5by Hand-J, 3 years agoits really great if i can merge session, remove duplicate and many operation to clearing up and summarizing my session.... and i cant make storing size more than 99 sessioan?
- Rated 5 out of 5by SouzaRM, 3 years agoExcellent purpose.
Phenomenal UI/UX!
Unfortunately it has not been updated since Jun 7, 2019 (V. 2.11.2).
Effusive congratulations to the developer. - Rated 4 out of 5by T-01, 3 years agoIt's good, IMHO the best session manager for Firefox, but the problem is, it just lost all the saved sessions for no apparent reason -- and no, I don't have other profiles, I just checked.
To be fair, most (all?) other session managers seem to do that from time to time, at least judging by user reviews. Perhaps it's more of a Firefox thing than this extension's fault, I don't really know. So it's four stars on trust because I don't know who's to blame.
I wonder how does one make automated backups outside of Firefox to work around this issue. Is it enough to copy the files under browser-extension-data/sessionboss@william.wong? Can they be safely copied while the extension is running, or is that looking for trouble? Or can the export be automated somehow?
Besides this, there's a minor UI annoyance: the buttons icons, which look right in the screenshots, for some reason look horrible here, as if they are being badly resized. - Rated 5 out of 5by nomoreoperaforme, 4 years agoThis is an excellent add-on but it took me some time how to work it out. Not the most intuitive of apps. But has saved the day a few times now. Best of the session restorers i have tried.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 16798532, 4 years agoIt is somewhat slow in my device, but I just have 4 gb. I love this extension, I'm always use it to order all of my different kind of works.
- Rated 4 out of 5by PBC, 4 years agoAfter closing Firefox I found a pop-up window from Microsoft was still open. Closing that saved it as my last session so I lost all my pinned tabs. Thanks to Session Boss, I was able to export the current session on my other PC then import it to this one. Everything has been recovered including favicons. Brilliant!
The only downside was that Firefox identified a couple of tabs as having errors and would not allow them to be restored. - Rated 5 out of 5by Andrew, 4 years agoI use this mainly before closing Firefox before rebooting my computer. The user session save works really well. I live how it saves the container tab being used. Great work - thank you!
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14099140, 4 years ago