Reviews for Session Sync
Session Sync by Gabriel Ivanica
Review by FirefoxUser
Rated 1 out of 5
by FirefoxUser, 5 years agoA long, long time ago, when "new" Firefox was genuinely new, so many extension just went straight to crap. Then, enterprising people like Ivanica went to work trying to bridge the gulf of functionality that developed over time. Well, whatever goes on now, I initially applauded his efforts and even donated early on, but then I noticed he pronounced bugs and problems as being solved when they are not even addressed or by telling people what they're experiencing isn't what's really going on. At this point, this extension is so woefully inadequate and he doesn't even try to update it to keep up with changes and issues (last update nearly a year ago), there's really no point using it anymore. It scrambles your tabs' sequence like what happens as if you just knocked everything off your desk or library shelves, and it calls that "saving" and "syncing." I'm just fed up with these poor excuses for extensions ruining my favorite browser. Here's some advice for anyone thinking of using this: just install the "Bookmark All Tabs" extension instead. You can also use another extension "Open Bookmarks Slowly" to keep from overwhelming your PC's RAM, but at least these won't make a mess of your system's sessions like this poor extension that has become, de facto, unmaintained and out of date.
Developer response
posted 5 years agoHope you take the time to read the response.
Regarding the bugs and problems that I reported as being solved, most probably I did that because I genuinely thought that I fix them. If they are not fixed or other issues appear after a while that's something different. Please consider that Firefox nowadays makes so many updates that simply you can't control. Addon developers have 0 control over what Firefox is nowadays and everything is designed for the rest of the users... that basically may have 1-2 addon or non at all installed... and power users have been left behind somehow simply because they don't matter in the grant scheme. Now I'm not saying that things are intentionally, but all these constant updates can brake stuff... make addons resets internal settings, disable them, and so many similar things. When this happen the addon developer have done nothing wrong but most of the users blame addon developers for these kind of errors as well.
Now I'm not saying that addons are clean and there are no bugs in them. Clearly is not the case.
In my case, I know that there are some issues, but was not really able to figure them out, when and why they happen. That doesn't mean that I'm right and a particular user is wrong and the addon is perfectly fine. Not at all... it just mean that I might have a very hard time finding the actual cause of the issues.
I have several of those like it's the one your describing above:
For example certain settings may make the restoring functionality to restore everything in reverse order. I can see that, and that's why I added an option to reverse the restoring of tabs. What I can't really get to reproduce is why you say they are scrambled. I simply can't make this happen... Trust me I'm really trying, I have really no idea why and how to do that. If I could understand where it's happening I can find the root cause and fix it. But in programming usually if you're not able to reproduce something is extremely hard to fix it. I look over the code again and again and things seems fine. My only concern is not to be something internally in Firefox that somehow when I tell him... please restore 1, 2, 3 he reorders them somehow into whatever else. But I can't tell if that's true or not because I can't reproduce it. Really really sorry about it.
The addon is unmaintained and out of date. I understand why you say that but it's not really true. I care about the addon a lot, but I simply considered that most of the functionality is solid enough and things work as they are suppose to. I do have a few issues reported, and lots of features requested, but imagine that working on them it's not 1-2 hours. I'm not a bad programmer and I can work pretty fast... but things can take a lot of time. New features need to be tested well before releasing them so I have to take into consideration that. Now, here's the problem, in the last few years I simply had very little time to invest into this addon (because life). I hope you understand that getting 1, 5, 10 $ through donation (once in a while... which I mean months), it's only as a form of thank you from some people that are really happy with the product and that in reality they really can't help you invest more time into developing the addon. Free open source addons don't help you live from a month to another... so as anyone around me that has to provide for themselves, I had to prioritize my job, other projects and so on, you know things that would actually... buy you food or whatever else you may dream of (even if that's not essential). And I think that it's perfectly fine.
Sadly, I have around 2-3 updates that were kind of ready, but are only available on Github, and I was not able to release them simply because I did have time to test the new features thoroughly.
It's the addon perfect. No not at all. Does it have issues. Seems so, but depends a lot on what you do. In my case it's a core part of my daily browser experience and it's really hard for me to live without it. I use it a lot. And it does the job perfectly without any errors for years. But at the same time I don't use all the features, I rarely restore full sessions and most of the time I interact with very few of the links and save new ones and so on. But when I do restore some sessions I have not seen errors (myself again... can' tell anything about anyone else)
Is the addon out of date. I personally don't think. There are many new people that try it and they like it and for them it's really useful. So it's always based on our personal experience with thinks. I just hope that with time when I will be able to finally make a serious update to it, I will fix as many things as possible that people have been reporting lately. Also... think about it... If I have not updated it... what exactly went wrong if issues started to pop-out in the last period. Most probably Firefox did something internally with an update that may have broke something from the addon. As addon developers, we simply can't put up with that. Having so many updates that may break things and us constantly be ready to fix things when it happens :D.
I may have a different view on this than others, but I put here the addon in the hope that it would help others as much as it helps me from day to day. It's not perfect, it's not good for everyone, but it's an option for those that find it useful.
Lastly, nothing I said above it's an excuse for your bad experience with the addon. I just stated some facts as I see them. I'm sorry about all the issues that you had and just so you know I will definitely try to fix things when I know exactly what goes wrong. Right now, trust me, I really have no clue. If you can give me any hint, concrete example that I can reproduce, that would be perfect and I might be able to fix it.
Thanks for using the addon for as long as you did, have a nice day.
Regarding the bugs and problems that I reported as being solved, most probably I did that because I genuinely thought that I fix them. If they are not fixed or other issues appear after a while that's something different. Please consider that Firefox nowadays makes so many updates that simply you can't control. Addon developers have 0 control over what Firefox is nowadays and everything is designed for the rest of the users... that basically may have 1-2 addon or non at all installed... and power users have been left behind somehow simply because they don't matter in the grant scheme. Now I'm not saying that things are intentionally, but all these constant updates can brake stuff... make addons resets internal settings, disable them, and so many similar things. When this happen the addon developer have done nothing wrong but most of the users blame addon developers for these kind of errors as well.
Now I'm not saying that addons are clean and there are no bugs in them. Clearly is not the case.
In my case, I know that there are some issues, but was not really able to figure them out, when and why they happen. That doesn't mean that I'm right and a particular user is wrong and the addon is perfectly fine. Not at all... it just mean that I might have a very hard time finding the actual cause of the issues.
I have several of those like it's the one your describing above:
For example certain settings may make the restoring functionality to restore everything in reverse order. I can see that, and that's why I added an option to reverse the restoring of tabs. What I can't really get to reproduce is why you say they are scrambled. I simply can't make this happen... Trust me I'm really trying, I have really no idea why and how to do that. If I could understand where it's happening I can find the root cause and fix it. But in programming usually if you're not able to reproduce something is extremely hard to fix it. I look over the code again and again and things seems fine. My only concern is not to be something internally in Firefox that somehow when I tell him... please restore 1, 2, 3 he reorders them somehow into whatever else. But I can't tell if that's true or not because I can't reproduce it. Really really sorry about it.
The addon is unmaintained and out of date. I understand why you say that but it's not really true. I care about the addon a lot, but I simply considered that most of the functionality is solid enough and things work as they are suppose to. I do have a few issues reported, and lots of features requested, but imagine that working on them it's not 1-2 hours. I'm not a bad programmer and I can work pretty fast... but things can take a lot of time. New features need to be tested well before releasing them so I have to take into consideration that. Now, here's the problem, in the last few years I simply had very little time to invest into this addon (because life). I hope you understand that getting 1, 5, 10 $ through donation (once in a while... which I mean months), it's only as a form of thank you from some people that are really happy with the product and that in reality they really can't help you invest more time into developing the addon. Free open source addons don't help you live from a month to another... so as anyone around me that has to provide for themselves, I had to prioritize my job, other projects and so on, you know things that would actually... buy you food or whatever else you may dream of (even if that's not essential). And I think that it's perfectly fine.
Sadly, I have around 2-3 updates that were kind of ready, but are only available on Github, and I was not able to release them simply because I did have time to test the new features thoroughly.
It's the addon perfect. No not at all. Does it have issues. Seems so, but depends a lot on what you do. In my case it's a core part of my daily browser experience and it's really hard for me to live without it. I use it a lot. And it does the job perfectly without any errors for years. But at the same time I don't use all the features, I rarely restore full sessions and most of the time I interact with very few of the links and save new ones and so on. But when I do restore some sessions I have not seen errors (myself again... can' tell anything about anyone else)
Is the addon out of date. I personally don't think. There are many new people that try it and they like it and for them it's really useful. So it's always based on our personal experience with thinks. I just hope that with time when I will be able to finally make a serious update to it, I will fix as many things as possible that people have been reporting lately. Also... think about it... If I have not updated it... what exactly went wrong if issues started to pop-out in the last period. Most probably Firefox did something internally with an update that may have broke something from the addon. As addon developers, we simply can't put up with that. Having so many updates that may break things and us constantly be ready to fix things when it happens :D.
I may have a different view on this than others, but I put here the addon in the hope that it would help others as much as it helps me from day to day. It's not perfect, it's not good for everyone, but it's an option for those that find it useful.
Lastly, nothing I said above it's an excuse for your bad experience with the addon. I just stated some facts as I see them. I'm sorry about all the issues that you had and just so you know I will definitely try to fix things when I know exactly what goes wrong. Right now, trust me, I really have no clue. If you can give me any hint, concrete example that I can reproduce, that would be perfect and I might be able to fix it.
Thanks for using the addon for as long as you did, have a nice day.
237 reviews
- Rated 5 out of 5by 远离中共邪教快退出党团队, 2 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Doza_Vikadina, 20 days agoОтличное и весьма удобное дополнение, поэтому здесь нечего добавить
- Rated 5 out of 5by 敬念法轮大法好远离瘟疫, 2 months ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by HumanistAtypik, 7 months ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by Jim Aldon D'Souza, a year agoI wish they would add firefox container support. I have tabs stored that are assigned to specific containers, which go haywire when restored in a new session because they get assigned to "no container" and go on a loop
- Rated 3 out of 5by rediffusion, a year ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Mostly Harmless, a year agoAlthough not updated for some time, this add-on has consistently worked for me for over 5 years. It's been my go-to research tool when using Firefox. Bookmarks are OK but fall short when trying to do some concerted research but this session manager is fantastic. It's never failed me and syncs easily between devices using Mozilla Sync. Thanks to the dev for this gem and hopefully it stays updated as Firefox progresses.
- Rated 4 out of 5by Montanagrl5, a year ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by EcksDy, 2 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14684093, 2 years agoThis addon does what firefox sync should do. And it does even more. You can setup collections of links. Fortunately firefox sync does sync bookmarks reliably. But it fails in syncing tabs in a reliable way. Here session sync comes in as a convenient workaround.
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 16850052, 2 years agoLost all saved history when I encounter a PC crash.
Developer response
posted 2 years agoPlease do not use Session Sync for auto history saving. It's not something that it's guaranteed and it's even in the description of the addon on the first line with bold. It's just a feature that is most of good enough but not something that is perfect.
THIS ADDON IS NOT INTENDED FOR AUTO-SAVING OF SESSIONS!
As for saving sessions manually, those sessions are stored into bookmarks so it should be impossible to lose them unless the whole Firefox profile is broken in which case is not the addon fault. - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 17989927, 2 years agoI use Session Sync since 3 years now and it worked super for me, fast, reliable and neat to use. After a recent computer breakdown, at the computer store they made a new operating system installation and a minor recovery of my data. Mr.Ivanica helped me providing precious information and all the support in order to get the extension back at work again with all my sessions 100% restored.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 17422724, 2 years agoExtremely useful addon. I have used this for at least 3 years.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 17698144, 2 years agoGreat add-on! Pinned tabs are saved, but not restored as pinned in Firefox on Linux. It would be fantastic to be able to find duplicate tabs also! Cheers!
- Rated 3 out of 5by BryanChance, 2 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 17687656, 2 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Shodaime, 2 years agoGreat add-on. I wish there are options to change the colour or theme of the interface. Something even basic, like; light, grey and dark.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 6010058, 2 years ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by PeaceByJesus.net, 2 years agoSorry: I had stated that "there is no option to save a session" since I did not see one, or read that this was to be found via mouse hover over a heart icon (like "favorites"). I thought it would be in text, and maybe via right click. As a long time user of the legacy Session Manager I also assumed that this add on would auto save sessions depending on how often you wanted, and where you wanted. And restore local web pages as well.
However, the untitled heart icon does work to save that session as a bookmark, which is good though where the bookmark is saved is not an option.
And I also see via the tutorial (moz-extension://cf54e725-638a-4074-b4ae-b519e7d0f380/data/home/home.html) that Gabriel Ivanica has put a lot of work into this add on and that there are some options!
So thanks for this needed good add on, and it works for me even while using the Izheil Multi-row tabs patch.Developer response
posted 2 years agoWhat do you mean by no option to save sessions?
There's a red heart icon that has a tooltip with "Save Session".
Auto-save is not saving in bookmarks, only manual saving will do so because otherwise I would create thousands of almost useless bookmarks for users.
The addon should work as intended, but in case some other addon creates some weird incompatibility it might not, but that's something I can't fix or change. Though, there should clearly be no issues to save a certain session. - Rated 5 out of 5by asdasd asdasasd, 2 years agoExcellent!!! very few plugins are as useful as this one. I like to have many tabs open and this tool allows me to manage them in a spectacular way. Thank you very much!!!
I hope that in the future it will continue to be updated, even if they don't add more features, it should be incorporated by Firefox natively. - Rated 2 out of 5by dafFDasd, 3 years agoOK, so I have updated the review:
Lists currently open windows and tabs, clicking switches to clicked tab. But no tab delete nor search in tabs functionality. Max Pop up window size is too small. It needs to be a full page in new tab.
Does not auto save sessions.
UPDATE: The „Tab View” button opens a new page instead of a pop up. I'd rename it to something more intuitive (maybe view everything in new tab). It is possible to search the tabs there using Ctrl+g.
But despite the entry being highlighted after exiting from the search, the Enter key does not activate the tab.
Also Ctrl+Shift+V is a bad choice of hotkey. It is already universally reserved and used as „Paste without formatting”. I'd recommend opening in new tab view by default instead.
UPDATE 2: The hotkey can be changed. But the Settings popup closes every damn time I set something. It requires to reopen the stupid main pop up, then the settings pop up again and scroll down again to the last place.
Additionally the developer has not responded to the lack of close current tab/window functionality. This is the most important feature remaining.
Instead of practical functionality, this add-on includes wasteful animations without option to turn them off. They should be off by default or removed completely. It is an (annoying) anti-feature to waste time staring at unnecessary delays in workflow.Developer response
posted 3 years agoHi. I understand that you would expect something from an addon but the description states clearly that the addon is not intended for Auto-Saving of session. At the same time popup size is simply limited by Firefox, that's the maximum any developer can do, simply I can't make it bigger than that because that's and API limitation (nobody knows why just Firefox stupid decisions).
Regarding the full-page or new-tab -> those options are already available
Regarding search in tabs: yeah.. sorry that's a feature that would've been nice but was not able to implement it.
Auto-Save: There is some autosave implemented but not a full-featured like maybe other addons might have, but the whole purpose of the addon is to manually save what you need. - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 17455306, 3 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by SiteBuilderOne, 3 years agoExcellent add-on, highly intuitive.
The ability to dock this in to native FireFox Sidebar would be awesome (Simple Tab Groups has this option). Currently using Tab View working great - thanks!!!