Reviews for Tabs Aside
Tabs Aside by Tim Weißenfels
Review by AYoungDuk13
Rated 5 out of 5
by AYoungDuk13, 7 years ago*Updated for version 1.10 on 2017-11-29:
THis project is under active development, which is always reassuring. Since my previous reviews, the author has added helpful new user tool-tips and added some polish.
Like some, I have been looking for a WebExtensions successor for OneTab. This application handles the basic premise of "Click to save all tabs from a window, and later restore them to a window". This extension calls its grouping of tabs "sessions" and it uses a provided Firefox sidebar to show you your saved tab groups as collapsible lists.
Overall it handles this basic functionality really well and cleanly; it is much better than the others I have tried. The provided Tab Sidebar is a new part of the project that the author is building on, but I cannot speak to what plans there are to expand the functionality in the future. For those wanting a detailed explanation about the current functionality, I will expand below, but the short of it is: the extension's provided sidebar (Tab Sidebar) allows restores of entire sessions, as well as renaming the sessions, but currently you won't be able to further organize the sessions or the sessions' tabs within this sidebar - you can however do this from the Bookmark Sidebar, now noted in the tool tips. Within the Bookmark Sidebar you can also handle organization of the sessions and sort/move/delete individual tabs.
I will mention that I still think this add-on could be used to build out a complete, featureful tab manager that rivals/surpasses what OneTab originally did. The main potential bonus I can see is it's integration into Firefox bookmarks and Sync. Because it ties into the bookmark system, this should allow a user to sync the sessions through their browsers. Note, I personally haven't tested this, but it should be possible. Potentially even on mobile too!
I think this add-on is worthy of a 5/5 rating on its own, where the main intent was for a simple/clean implementation. As the developer commented to me, it was orginally intended as a simple implementation, and it does this really well!
For more details about my description, what this extension appears to do is create a bookmark folder, and when you save a new session, it adds the session tabs within a new sub-folder. I think this approach is rather clever, with some real potential benefits, a-la Firefox Sync, where this folder structure and session-folder bookmarks could be shared between browsers. In general though, from the bookmarks sidebar (or bookmarks manager window) you are able to reorganize the the folder order (the session folders are shown in reverse order to how they are listed in the Tabs Aside folder), and you are able reorganize bookmarks/tabs within (and between) these folders. In fact, I could see some power users preferring to use this add-on as a method of quickly creating sessions, and then using their own bookmark manager for organization (ie the bookmark sidebar).
Currently, the extension's Tab Sidebar is tied into the behavior of the session creation. When you save a session, it opens the Tab Sidebar, makes the new session list, closes the tabs, and opens a new tab page. A couple of configuration options here could really help allow users to make this part of the experience as personally efficient as possible.
For future feature requests, I think being able to further handle organization from within this Tab Sidebar would be really slick, ie changing their order, and being able to sort/move/restore individual tabs (like OneTab did). You could even start building in some of the extra features like "staring"/pinning sessions that OneTab had, while still utilizing Firefox's underlying bookmark system to allow these things to sync across machines.
Just wanted to tell the developer, great job here. I wanted to take the time for this long review and to personally contribute financially because of the hard work done, and hope others will contribute as well. I think this has the potential to be the best Bookmark/Tab Session manager we've seen to date, and can't wait to see what you plan to do with it!
Past reviews:
1.7 Review
https://pastebin.com/wqJebekP
THis project is under active development, which is always reassuring. Since my previous reviews, the author has added helpful new user tool-tips and added some polish.
Like some, I have been looking for a WebExtensions successor for OneTab. This application handles the basic premise of "Click to save all tabs from a window, and later restore them to a window". This extension calls its grouping of tabs "sessions" and it uses a provided Firefox sidebar to show you your saved tab groups as collapsible lists.
Overall it handles this basic functionality really well and cleanly; it is much better than the others I have tried. The provided Tab Sidebar is a new part of the project that the author is building on, but I cannot speak to what plans there are to expand the functionality in the future. For those wanting a detailed explanation about the current functionality, I will expand below, but the short of it is: the extension's provided sidebar (Tab Sidebar) allows restores of entire sessions, as well as renaming the sessions, but currently you won't be able to further organize the sessions or the sessions' tabs within this sidebar - you can however do this from the Bookmark Sidebar, now noted in the tool tips. Within the Bookmark Sidebar you can also handle organization of the sessions and sort/move/delete individual tabs.
I will mention that I still think this add-on could be used to build out a complete, featureful tab manager that rivals/surpasses what OneTab originally did. The main potential bonus I can see is it's integration into Firefox bookmarks and Sync. Because it ties into the bookmark system, this should allow a user to sync the sessions through their browsers. Note, I personally haven't tested this, but it should be possible. Potentially even on mobile too!
I think this add-on is worthy of a 5/5 rating on its own, where the main intent was for a simple/clean implementation. As the developer commented to me, it was orginally intended as a simple implementation, and it does this really well!
For more details about my description, what this extension appears to do is create a bookmark folder, and when you save a new session, it adds the session tabs within a new sub-folder. I think this approach is rather clever, with some real potential benefits, a-la Firefox Sync, where this folder structure and session-folder bookmarks could be shared between browsers. In general though, from the bookmarks sidebar (or bookmarks manager window) you are able to reorganize the the folder order (the session folders are shown in reverse order to how they are listed in the Tabs Aside folder), and you are able reorganize bookmarks/tabs within (and between) these folders. In fact, I could see some power users preferring to use this add-on as a method of quickly creating sessions, and then using their own bookmark manager for organization (ie the bookmark sidebar).
Currently, the extension's Tab Sidebar is tied into the behavior of the session creation. When you save a session, it opens the Tab Sidebar, makes the new session list, closes the tabs, and opens a new tab page. A couple of configuration options here could really help allow users to make this part of the experience as personally efficient as possible.
For future feature requests, I think being able to further handle organization from within this Tab Sidebar would be really slick, ie changing their order, and being able to sort/move/restore individual tabs (like OneTab did). You could even start building in some of the extra features like "staring"/pinning sessions that OneTab had, while still utilizing Firefox's underlying bookmark system to allow these things to sync across machines.
Just wanted to tell the developer, great job here. I wanted to take the time for this long review and to personally contribute financially because of the hard work done, and hope others will contribute as well. I think this has the potential to be the best Bookmark/Tab Session manager we've seen to date, and can't wait to see what you plan to do with it!
Past reviews:
1.7 Review
https://pastebin.com/wqJebekP
Developer response
posted 7 years agoThanks again for your lengthy review. The sidebar has room for improvement and I have some ideas for that, including session reordering via drag and drop. Unfortunately that has to wait a bit since I am currently working on version 2.0. This next major version will extend the session functionality quite a bit.
Thanks for your support :)
Thanks for your support :)
53 reviews
- Rated 5 out of 5by eegemen42, a year ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Alby, a year ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13326876, 2 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by ياسين العراقي, 3 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Little6host, 3 years agoLove the addon. I've tried a lot of others and they were too buggy or unintuitive. This is simple and effective and doesn't use RAM. Love it. Cheers!
- Rated 3 out of 5by Sithu, 3 years ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 17129771, 3 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Anonyom, 3 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Ethan, 4 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 16329114, 5 years ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by irvnriir, 5 years agoIt has some issues yet, but has more features and already/{probably will be} more ergonomic than OneTab .
Developer response
posted 5 years agoThanks for the review. Happy to discuss those issues over on GitHub. - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 16029391, 5 years agoI really like this add-on. It isn't the slickest, but it is the most useful tabs add-on I've tried. I really like that it tracks changes to an active session. It is exactly what I've been looking for. Hope it catches on so the development continues.
Developer response
posted 5 years agoThanks for the review! Development will of course continue, just at a slower pace for now. - Rated 5 out of 5by mMm, 5 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by J2ui, 5 years agoThis is a very good and helpful add-on,here's a five-star review so you keep good work going,Also I have a suggestion. I would like to see a feature that lets you drag any tab or tabs to a specific session.Although I know that you can add it by right-clicking and choose what session you want.It'll be awesome.Otherwise the add-on does what it should do and is very helpful,keep the good work!
Edit after developer response: I just noticed that if I want to add a single tab to a new session I can't,It has to be an already saved session,Can you add this option in the right-clicking menu when you right click a tab?,and also thanks for your response. If you can't add dragging tabs feature it's not a problem,But consider adding the option I wrote earlier in this edit if you can.Thanks!Developer response
posted 5 years agoThanks for the review! If you have active sessions enabled you can move tabs to the window of such a session and it will be added. Dragging tabs to the sidebar is as far as I know not possible to implement.
Edit: You can now create new sessions from the tab context menu - Rated 1 out of 5by Esteban, 5 years agoIt used to be good, now the "stored in a folder" thing made it a joke. I don't need an app to do that, it's just ridiculous.
Seriously, this is plain stupid, I hope an alternative pops up soon.Developer response
posted 5 years agoI think there might be a misunderstanding... Tabs Aside has always stored the tabs that you set aside in a bookmark folder, there has never ever been a version that did not do this. I think this approach makes sense since the user has full control over the data. There are however other (similar) extensions that do not use bookmarks for storage. - Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 14582672, 5 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13443534, 5 years ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 15163168, 6 years agoI just wish I could change keybinds or turn them off so I never accidentally hit them
Developer response
posted 5 years agoYou can edit (and disable) keyboard shortcuts with Firefox. Unfortunately the feature is a little bit hidden. Go to about:addons and click the cog button below the search. There should be an entry "Manage extension shortcuts". Hope this helps ;) - Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 14183139, 6 years agoThis is a lifesaving extension -- it's transformed my approach to browsing. It's a little rough around the edges but generally very functional. An additional feature that would make a huge difference would be to have the ability to sort sessions you've set aside, either manually or automatically.
Developer response
posted 5 years agoThanks for the review! Although you can not do it through the extensions UI you can sort sessions (and the tabs within) using the browsers bookmark manager (Ctrl+Shift+B). I want to implement session reordering using drag-n-drop in the sidebar at some point though. - Rated 5 out of 5by Nick, 6 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by nocontext, 6 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14723278, 6 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 13858718, 6 years agoUI is not streamlined, takes many clicks. Icon does not work with dark theme (invisible). I do not like the persistent notification/counter for tabs sessions. It takes no less than 4 clicks to remove a session.
Developer response
posted 6 years agoThanks for the review. The extension will now automatically choose the light/dark icon depending on your theme. With default settings (windowed mode) Tabs Aside will not show anything on the browser action badge. There have been some UI improvements with more to come. - Rated 4 out of 5by gprst, 6 years ago