Closing last tab causes all groups to be empty

[Joseph-DiGiovanni]

Closing the last tab of the current group closes Firefox and all groups are empty upon reopening.

To Reproduce

1. Open Firefox
2. Close all tabs in active group
3. Firefox closes
4. Reopen Firefox
5. All groups are now empty

Expected behavior
Other groups should remain untouched

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS and version: NixOS 24.11
• Firefox version: 135
• Simple Tab Groups version: 5.2

Possibly related to #716 and #1217 but they do not have clear steps to reproduce the issue.

[Xomps]

Hello, I had this issue today after I disabled "Open previous windows and tabs". guess this extension only manages the currently open tabs and doesn't open/close tabs (which makes sense).

I don't actually know how would someone fix this. I guess the extension would need permissions to open/close tabs on demand.

[philg-dev]

Hi @Xomps yes, the firefox setting "Open previous windows and tabs" is necessary for STG to work seamlessly.

The extension has permission to open and close tabs, but it is designed around Firefox's feature to hide open tabs. So fundamental design is based on having all the tabs from your tab groups "open" at all times and when you switch tab groups, you basically just switch the tab visibility to make the previously active group's tabs invisible and the newly active group's tabs visible.

The open hidden tabs may be fully loaded into RAM, but generally they're discarded from RAM when needed and after restarting Firefox. Once tabs are discarded from RAM they'll reload on demand when you switch to them. That's why the design works even with hundreds of technically "open" tabs and still being memory efficient.

Usually STG creates backups of your sessions in your Downloads folder, so hopefully you'll be able to restore your session from one of those recent backups. Aside from that it's also possible that there's an "STG" folder in your bookmarks. You can open entire bookmark folders as STG groups - so that's another way you could potentially restore your lost session.