+78
Started

Tabs Jumping around in position in Chrome

Brian T 11 years ago updated by Hansen W 4 years ago 34

For some reason my tabs positions jump around while I'm using them in Chrome.  I'd like to request they stay in the position they were opened or dragged to.  Thanks!

Answer

Answer
Started

With the latest release I have fixed the most common cause (that I am aware of) of unwanted tab reordering/jumping. I'm pretty sure there are still at least a couple other (rarer) causes of this, so I'm still looking for those, as well as formulating a plan for how to prevent this problem completely going forward.

If my new plan works, then Sidewise should become immune to tab-jumping issues regardless of other bugs in Sidewise (or changes in Chrome) that can currently cause the problem.

For example, one general issue is that if Sidewise somehow fails to add a newly created tab to the tree (e.g. Chrome doesn't notify us about it), that can currently induce tab-jumping problems because Sidewise's tab order is out of sync with Chrome's tab order. My plan will prevent circumstances like this (which are essentially unavoidable as Google evolves the Chrome Extension API) from leading to the tab-jumping behavior.

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I really want to get this problem fixed but it is a difficult one to reproduce. So far I almost never see it occur here, and can't reproduce it reliably.

I'm going to try some new methods of "forcibly" causing Sidewise to do this bad tab-jumping behavior this week to see if I can trace down the exact cause and/or appropriate solution.

+7

I believe what is happening is that if you rearrange tabs by dragging and dropping them normally (using Chrome itself instead of using the Sidewise sidebar), Sidewise moves them back to where they were, at some short (~5 second) interval.


This makes Sidewise unusable for me, so I would also like it to be fixed.

...Or if a new tab is opened via middle-clicking a link. Chrome and Sidewise fight on where the child tab will go??

Under review

I really want to get this problem fixed but it is a difficult one to reproduce. So far I almost never see it occur here, and can't reproduce it reliably.

I'm going to try some new methods of "forcibly" causing Sidewise to do this bad tab-jumping behavior this week to see if I can trace down the exact cause and/or appropriate solution.

Yes, its happening after rearrange tabs by dragging and dropping them normally

Still jumping, and now not display tabs after jumping-tab. If move tab after not-visible-in-sidewise-tabs — tab jump back.

When move tab by dragging and dropping them normally to the End (make Tab last) — Sidewise not accept this. Maybe it's general problem?

Answer
Started

With the latest release I have fixed the most common cause (that I am aware of) of unwanted tab reordering/jumping. I'm pretty sure there are still at least a couple other (rarer) causes of this, so I'm still looking for those, as well as formulating a plan for how to prevent this problem completely going forward.

If my new plan works, then Sidewise should become immune to tab-jumping issues regardless of other bugs in Sidewise (or changes in Chrome) that can currently cause the problem.

For example, one general issue is that if Sidewise somehow fails to add a newly created tab to the tree (e.g. Chrome doesn't notify us about it), that can currently induce tab-jumping problems because Sidewise's tab order is out of sync with Chrome's tab order. My plan will prevent circumstances like this (which are essentially unavoidable as Google evolves the Chrome Extension API) from leading to the tab-jumping behavior.

---

I really want to get this problem fixed but it is a difficult one to reproduce. So far I almost never see it occur here, and can't reproduce it reliably.

I'm going to try some new methods of "forcibly" causing Sidewise to do this bad tab-jumping behavior this week to see if I can trace down the exact cause and/or appropriate solution.

-1

Happen to me too. I believe the problem is that Sidewise puts these tabs that jump into something like a sub-directory path in Sidewise. This is what I noticed, so hope this provide some visible feedback to you for your investigation.

Another way this can happen - it seemed to happen this way for me.

What I think happened is that I was on the 14th of 20 tabs on the list when Sidewise crashed (Aw Snap!!!).  Nothing happened immediately, but when I re-opened Chrome (SRW Iron), I noticed that the 14th tab had jumped to the 19th tab.

When I opened Sidewise, I saw the 14th tab hibernated (even though I never told it to), and the duplicate tab in the 19th position.

I couldn't unhibernate the tab, so I just moved the 19th one to the 14th position and deleted the hibernated entry.

What I am thinking happens is when Sidewise crashes, it hibernates the current tab and then tries to re-open it - which for me would be at the extreme right due to the New Tabs Always Last Extension.

But I see Aw Snap!!! so often it is almost unusable.

-1
Thanks the new update solved my issue and now the tabs are not jumping
Things have gone a little crazy the past day or two. Tabs keep shuffling about a lot. It seems that new tabs are counted as children of existing ones, and sidewise keeps trying to rearrange them according to hierarchy.

It would be good to simply have the option of disabling Sidewise's tab ordering functionality completely and just go with whatever order the tabs happen to be in. Is this possible?
Another error like this occurs if you don't keep Sidewise running (I don't since it isn't compatible with New Tabs Always last).

If you disable Sidewise and then browse in Chrome, tabs that were previously open before you disabled Sidewise will be shown as hibernated, tabs that are new work, but some tabs that were open will show in their current position as hibernated and then jump to the new position.

I would also like to see an option that disabled the tab hierarchy and allowed it to work with New Tabs Always Last.

+1
Hi, I really like Sidewise, but I keep having the Tab jumping/reordering issue, and I just updated Chrome (not sure how to update Sidewise, I assume it's automatic) and I think I have the latest version of Sidewise:  2013.9.15.0

Anyway, I can reproduce this regularly.  All you have to do is open a few dozen tabs in various ways, Ctrl+T, right click a link in an existing tab and choose open in new tab (makes a child), click a link from outside chrome, such as in an email or Word document or PDF.  I even have more than one window in Chrome, so try that, drag one tab off first window to make a new one, then open tabs in that one too.

Now that you have a good heirarchy, in Sidewise, with some children, start trying to reorder tabs in any of the windows.  After a few seconds, you should see the tabs reorder themselves to the order Sidewise has them.

I have tried using Sidewise to reorder and when I do, it seems to stick, ie no jumping.  I do not want to have to go to the Sidewise window just to reorder my tabs, that screws up my workflow.

Sidewise should really accept Chrome window initiated tab reordering, so in other words, tab reordering should work in either order: Sidewise forcing Chrome to reorder and Chrome forcing Sidewise to reorder.

Any chance you could take a look at this since it's been months and months since someone's reported on this bug but it's still there in the most recent version of Sidewise and Chrome (I just updated TODAY: 2014-07-24)

Thanks

--  Mike
+1
Hi,
I'm also experiencing a lot of tabs jumping around. Also sometimes (much rare compared to jumping) a tab is not shown in the Sidewise but they exist in the Chrome. 
I second the above suggestions to restrict the level of tab hierarchy (to 1 for example, or removing completely) if it solves jumping issue...
Thanks for this nice tool, ilker.  
P.S. I started using Sidewise as a replacement to old good "side tabs" or "tree style tabs in FF" but I start to like it more. (it shows all the tabs from all open windows and the hibernation makes it more convenient.)
+1
This might not be covered by your project scope, but the New Tab Redirect (by Jim Schubert, not the knock-offs) extension causes new tabs to be redirected to an arbitrary URL. When I open a new tab with NTR and Sidewise enabled, Sidewise reorders the tab according to its position in the hierarchy. The new tab is always a child of the tab that was selected before. This is very reliable.
-7
chrome settings+extensions, there is an extension called "tabs position" or something like that, disable or delete it. problem solved.

As of today (11/24/2015), my tabs are also still moving around on their own. Is it possible to just put in an option that prevents the app from changing the indexes on the tabs? I recognize the value in putting the tabs in the same order as they are in the hierarchy, especially when users like me have a zillion tabs open, but it can also be irritating when I'm trying to debug something, and the tabs keep changing order. Thanks!!!

+2

still have this bug as well

+1

I also still have this issue on Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.3, with Chrome 49, and other OSes.


It's been happening for a while, and it seems to be related to a tab de-sync issue. This may be caused by Sidewise not staying up-to-date with Chrome, and the browser may have changed or add tab events that Sidewise does not handle.


This may appear after some actions such as normally creating tabs after a while, or though ones created automatically by extensions, JavaScript, pop-ups, or otherwise.
This may be seen as the tab does not appear in Sidewise, but can be seen in Chrome's tab list at the top. Navigating to it does not highlight any row in Sidewise, and cannot be searched for.


A better culprit however, may be Chrome's Recovery or Restore feature, trying to re-open all tabs that may have been lost due to a previous crash. I'm not sure, but this may have been introduced at a certain point after Sidewise started development, and just wasn't accounted for? Just speculating...

I may have even noticed this on some other operating systems, and tried to prevent it from automatically re-opening these tabs. If I was successful in preventing that, I could see the old tabs in a hibernated window in Sidewise. This would be useful, and to keep Sidewise in sync with my browser, and to continue using the integration, I could simply wake the window and use my old session from there.


I have also found a way to restore single pages at a time, but it is a bit time-consuming, and not effective enough for dealing with many pages at once.
To do this, I simply open a new window, drag the target tab to there, close the tab, and the reopen it to have it appear in Sidewise. Then I can move it back to the original window I was working with to some varied success.


I would rather like to see this issue fixed, but I see development has stalled somewhat, and we may just have to either fix it ourselves, or use an alternative such as Tabs Outliner.

+1

My tabs are jumping practically every time I open a link, and by disabling extensions and re-enabling one by one, I have confirmed that the culprit is Sidewise.


This is quite the deal breaker. :-(

I really want to get this problem fixed but it is a difficult one to reproduce. So far I almost never see it occur here, and can't reproduce it reliably. 

Hey Joel,


First, thanks for your work and effort on creating and maintaining this plugin.  I enjoy being able to open sets of tabs that are all related (like all my monthly billpay/finance, pay my bills, close them all).


I'm experiencing this tab jump, but not while I'm using chrome.  It only happens when I completely close chrome and restart it.  Suddenly there are a lot of "dead" tabs introduced in sidewise that don't appear in the actual tabs, and the order of everything is mixed up.


It's nice that I can use sidewise to click the X on the dead tabs and drag my tabs back around to the order I want, but it would be better if this weren't happening.


I'm open to you giving me a debug version of the plugin and sending you back the debug log if this will help you figure out the issue.


It happens every time I've used chrome for a little while (visiting sites, closing tabs, etc) and then restart it, so I'm sure you'd enjoy a no-false-positives log file.


One thing I haven't done is purposely observed sidewise before I shutdown chrome to see if the dead tabs are there before close, but I can say I never noticed these dead tabs before shutdown.  I'll pay more attention to this detail the next couple times I restart chrome.


Thanks again!

Can confirm it still happens.

Steps to reproduce (for the most part):

- Use the plugin
- Don't restart (I've yet to restart once since I installed it yesterday and I'm a bit afraid to do so now)

- Sit on a tab in the middle of the window

- Ctrl-T to create a new tab

- New tab scurries backwards to sit after the one you were on when you Ctrl-T'ed


Good luck! Awesome extension for managing out-of-control sessions :D

I surmise that the issue has something to do with not storing the tab reference of the new tab after it's created, and then using the original tab reference's index when doing the refresh. I ran into a similar problem with an extension that I was previously developing for work.

+2

Getting really sick of my tabs dancing around the tab bar! One data point in my case that may be related is that I had a number of tabs in sidewise that were in hibernation that I could see might make it worse.

It may also be that the new indexes aren't being stored after chrome.tabs.onUpdated. That's the other problem that I was having. 

I closed the hibernated tabs and it had no effect. Tabs are still doing a jig all over the tab bar

+1

Its happening for me also suddenly tabs move around. Its very irritating 

tabs still jump . very annoying.
any debug avaible for that?

Hi; I'm a new Sidewise (SW) user, and every new tab I create jumps!

If I'm on a page like https://www.additudemag.com/category/manage-adhd-life/getting-things-done/ and right-click on any link, a new tab is opened for that link just to the right of the current tab.  If I sit and watch for about 10 seconds, the new tab moves to the left of the current tab.  When the new tab is created, it shows up *above* the current tab in the SW window, and that's the final order of tabs after the new tab jumps.

Perhaps SW is being told that the new tab is to the left of the current tab, and after a few seconds it's making the actual tab order match its internal state?  This would make sense, since manually moving tabs in SW affects the real order.

I just tested this by right-clicking on a link, clicking on 'open link in a new tab', and immediately dragging the new tab below the current tab in SW.  The tab did not jump, as it was where SW thought it should be.

Another test: I was viewing my 16th tab out of 19, then clicked on the '...' menu, hovered over 'More tools  >', then clicked 'Extensions'.  Chrome created a new tab at the right end of the tab bar, but SW thought the new tab was to the right of (er, below) the current tab.  After a few seconds, the new tab was moved to be just to the right of the current tab, 3 tabs away.


Oh, this is interesting; I opened a 'Settings' tab, then grabbed it, and put it at the right end of the tab, and it jumped back to where it was after a few seconds.  I tried dragging it somewhere else, and now it's disappeared from SW.

Browser: Chrome Version 72.0.3626.121 (Official Build) (64-bit)

OS: Ubuntu 16.04

Sidewise version: Sidewise Tree Style Tabs 2017.2.12.0

I just downloaded the current version - and not only does it reorder tabs - which appear to be my pinned tabs, it also creates doubles of tabs - possibly because pinned and when I "wake." But because this is happening I have had to disable for now; though love other features.

+1

Tab jumping is STILL a major issue -  looks like its been 6 years and the problem has not been resolved.   Otherwise i like the program, but, i am now searching for another alternative...   too bad.   IF this ever gets 'fixed' for real, let me know

+1

Guys, It's obvious this project has been abandoned because I've been watching this thread for almost as long as this thread has been around. I've switched over long ago to a different Chrome extension that does the same thing plus other things like session management. 

It is rude to mention a direct competitor in the thread so if you are interested what I've switched to and used for the last 5 years, send me a direct message and I can tell you.

+1

Care to let us know which alternative have you switched to?

@Alex Pupescu 


Doesn't seem like I can figure out how to send a DM in this forum so I'll leave a clue instead of mentioning the name directly.

Go to the Chrome Extension Webstore and paste edacconmaakjimmfgnblocblbcdcpbko into the search field. You will find what I am currently using.