Stopped working for me. FF 35.0.1

[Innomen]

Stopped working for me. FF 35.0.1

I click the button and nothing happens and the tab grenade page is empty.

[mrodriguezo]

Same happened to me. Please help with this, I have backed up most of my pages with this plugin...

[AndydeCleyre]

I know this is an old issue, but this is now happening to me with latest FF. Is there any way to recover? I think I have thousands of bookmarks in there, if they're still there.

[AndydeCleyre]

Oh F . . .

Does this mean all the data is gone? Not backed up, just gone?

Edit: I didn't even realize this was abandoned. Holy mother F-ing F did I make a mistake relying on this. I believe it's irresponsible to keep this on the FFA website, and not to put a big abandoned notice in the readme.

[Innomen]

Agree completely in general. Any plugin which is abandoned needs to have a very clear marker that it is abandoned.

I left firefox entirely because of crap like this.

Edit: Perhaps you could roll back your version of firefox somehow?

[AndydeCleyre]

Since I've been burned by both this extension and the onetab extension, I've now got a crude replacement system using copy urls expert, open with, xclip, and libnotify.

read.sh:

#!/bin/bash
set -e

TAB_DIR="$HOME/.config/ff-tabs"
mkdir -p "$TAB_DIR"
cat "$TAB_DIR"/*.txt | xclip -sel clip
notify-send -i firefox "Copied $(xclip -sel clip -o | wc -l) URLs from file:" "$(xclip -sel clip -o | head)\n. . ."

ReadTabs.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Exec=~/path/to/read.sh
Name=Tab Files to Clipboard
NoDisplay=true
Type=Application
Icon=document-import

write.sh:

#!/bin/bash
set -e

TAB_DIR="$HOME/.config/ff-tabs"
mkdir -p "$TAB_DIR"
TAB_FILE="$TAB_DIR/$(date +%Y.%m.%d_%H.%M.%S).txt"
MAX_BACKUPS=5

if [[ -f "$TAB_FILE" ]]; then
    for (( i="$MAX_BACKUPS"; i>=1; i-- )); do
        mv "$TAB_FILE.$i" "$TAB_FILE.$((i+1))" || true
    done
    mv "$TAB_FILE" "$TAB_FILE.1"
    rm "$TAB_FILE.$((MAX_BACKUPS+1))" || true
fi

xclip -sel clip -o > "$TAB_FILE"
notify-send -i firefox "Saved $(xclip -sel clip -o | wc -l) URLs to file:" "$(xclip -sel clip -o | head)\n. . ."

WriteTabs.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Exec=~/path/to/write.sh
Name=Clipboard to Tab File
NoDisplay=true
Type=Application
Icon=document-export

Video demonstration

[mindstormer12]

@AndydeCleyre Since you included a video demonstration on how to use it, can you also explain how to install/run it? I'm very new to Linux and I'm using a window manager (i3wm) so it would be of great help (I don't think window managers support .desktop files). What do I do after I install the two Firefox addons 'copy urls expert' and 'open with'? Thank you.

[AndydeCleyre]

@mindstormer12 Sure.

No problem regarding .desktop files and your wm; the .desktop format is just a standard for defining application launchers, especially used by application menus. They can also be used with the Open With extension -- the advantage over using the scripts directly with Open With is that you get to control the displayed name and icon, pretty much.

1. Make sure you have xclip and libnotify:

which xclip
which notify-send

Those commands will show you where those executables are on your system, or report that they weren't found. If either was not found, install the corresponding package with your package manager. If you're not sure about this, let me know which distro you're using.

2. Make a folder somewhere for these scripts and launchers to live inside. I'll be using ~/Code/grenadine, but you can use whatever you want. Let's call this the script folder. Maybe you know this, but ~ is used in bash and some other places as a shorthand for your home folder (/home/mycoolusername), and is equivalent to the $HOME you'll see in the scripts. I chose "grenadine" because it reminds me of (tab) grenades, but without the bitter violence.

3. Create those four files from my last comment inside your script folder. Make the scripts executable; from inside the script folder, run:

chmod +x read.sh write.sh

4. In each of those two scripts, you are welcome to change the value assigned to TAB_DIR. This is the path to a folder where text files will be stored, containing your tab lists. The folder does not need to exist already, the scripts will create it if necessary. You might want to choose a more convenient location, as you have to manage these files yourself. The only time these scripts will delete any of the text files is if you save more than 5 times in under 1 second (so never).

5. In each of the two .desktop files, change the Exec value to match your chosen script folder. In my case, these are ~/Code/grenadine/read.sh and ~/Code/grenadine/write.sh. You are also welcome to change the Name values to be more meaningful if you think of better names. The Icon value can be changed, if you like, to the name (without file extension) of any icon in your GTK icon theme, or it can be a full path to an icon file (with extension).

6. In the Open With settings use the Add button to add the .desktop files in your script folder.

7. In the FF menu, hit Customize and add the Copy URLs Expert item to your navigation bar, or wherever you want it. Do the same with Open With; you'll have two options for this -- a singular item with each launcher in a drop-down menu, or a flattened set of launcher buttons.

And that's that.

There are nice options available for Copy URLs Expert, including setting the default action when you hit the button without using its drop-down. I keep it at the default (copy tabs in this window).

If the notification sticks around longer than you like, you can edit the notify-send lines in each script; for example, to expire the notification after 5 seconds, you can change the beginning to:

notify-send -t 5000 -i firefox " . . .

If you change the script files, the changes will be immediate. If you change the launcher (.desktop) files, you'll need to remove and re-add them in Open With, as it makes its own copies that don't get updated when you change the originals.

This is far from perfect or complete or streamlined, but its operation should at least be transparent and safe. That said, it's largely untested and may eat your cat.

Let me know what you think (or what goes wrong).

[Gitoffthelawn]

Where did my cat go? 🐱