Make pinned tabs persist between windows (by default)

[nwebb]

• If a user bookmarks a page/site they are showing clear intent to keep a permanent link
• If a user pins a page they are clearly indicating that they are not yet finished with the page

Currently, the slightest mistake in FF (e.g. closing windows in the wrong order) causes the user to lose all their pinned sites. If the user notices in time they can recover these lost pins, but why should they have to, and why would a browser ever remove sites when the user is clearly indicating that they are not yet done with them? This seems extremely counter-intuitive. 

Some browsers, like Safari, now ensure that your pinned tabs appear at the top of every new window. This means that as a user you can say 'I'd like to read this later' and ensure the page(s) are (i) easily available (ii) prominently visible to serve as a reminder (iii) can be saved semi-permanently without cluttering up your bookmarks (iv) can be easily added and removed as necessary without the need to hunt through saved bookarmaks.

And if a user doesn't want this behaviour? An option to override it could be provided in which FF automatically delete the pins when it opens a new window. There could be a second option where subsequent windows simply hide pins (i.e. they only ever appear in the primary window).

This feels like it gives bookmarks and pinned pages much more defined roles.

Note: I'm still struggling to think why a user would want to pin a page if they didn't want it to persist until they unpinned it, and why they would not want a pinned page to carry over into a new browser window. 

[FiddleDiddle]

Make pinned tabs persist between sessions, regardless of browsing history.

I choose not to retain browsing history from session to session. Because of this, I can't make effective use of the Pinned Tabs feature because their state is history-dependent. I don't think this should be the case.

[peeweek]

I'm also pleading in favor of having this feature implemented and enabled by default. For me, the so-called pinned tabs help me start with a default browser window with my commonly used sites pinned as tabs. I also open other tabs in that window.

However, i also tend to drag some of them out of that window to create new ones (sometimes, to prevent distraction, other times to get a side by side view). (The "Restore windows upon startup" option in the setting can help, but it restores too much of the state when I reopen my browser.)

And this is when the system goes wrong. I can face many different cases :

1 ) Closing my windows in the "right order" (AFAIK closing the "main" window last): in that case re-opening FF again will prompt me with my main window

2 ) Closing my windows in a "wrong order" : I can't say for sure but many times, I end up with my main window cleared. Going to history and reopening closed windows work

3 ) Closing my windows in a "wrong order" (mark-II) : Sometimes, after reopening, the recently closed windows list is empty and I just have to redo all my pinned tabs.

I have done this about 3 times in 2 weeks, it is not extremely painful, but it makes the experience a bit annoying. I am not sure if it is a bug or not, and about how to handle this one. I know that enforcing pinned tabs for everybody can be also a problem, as not everyone uses these pins for the same purpose.

Here are some UX QoL suggestions :

- Add an option "Save this window as my main window" in the contextual menus of the tabs area, so this window becomes "main" and restored upon startup.

- Add 2 options to "Save tabs" and "Restore tabs" in the contextual menus of the tabs area, so a saved set of selected tabs can be saved and restored. (Yes, I figured out recently that we had multi select of tabs and i love it! :))

I don't know if it can help, I really love firefox for this cool tab pin feature, and especially combined with the container tabs.

[Tink]

Please LOCK Pinned tabs to stop them disappearing .....

Dear Mozilla,

I really prefer your browser to that DREADED Edge browser from MS.  But, whenever I pin tabs in Firefox, they remain for several days and then for some reason one day they are ALL gone.  I can say that on one ocassion it was after an Update, however, on the other multiple ocassions, I cannot say what caused them to vanish.

Allow us to pin a series of TABs and then protect them by locking them, that includes keeping the original URL as the default load for the pinned tab.

I sometimes shut down the browser by clicking the top right X and sometimes the Exit option in the menu..... but am uncertain as to why on some ocassions the tabs vanish the next time I load Firefox from the taskbar.

Thank you.

[AMK]

I have a lot of pinned tabs, but when I opened a new window of FF to copy a URL and then closed FF accidentally, I did not find the pinned tabs.

It is so difficult to lose your information.

[ephemeral]

Totally agree with @FiddleDiddle - pinned tabs should be an option to exempt from clearing history on browser close.

[polarbearkev]

I agree with this!! If you have an open Firefox window and you make a pinned tab in it, then you open a second window (for whatever reason), if you accidentally close the first window...POOF!!! Your pinned tab is gone! This is ludicrous, why would you design it that way? Please fix this ASAP! I am stuck using Safari because of this issue.

They are called PINNED TABS for a reason! They're pinned, ie. they should never go away until they are unpinned by the user. 

[Guloo]

When I opened two windows, then closing the one that no pin tabs on it first, all pin tabs gone...

[krema]

The current design of discarding all pinned tabs in all windows when closing one window without pinned tabs is just the worst UX design. All other browser vendor's design teams know this, because this is how actual humans expect pined tabs to behave:

1. Pin a tab
2. Pinned tab is present in EVERY window, no matter if new window, or some other window has been closed before it.

Mozilla then makes proper UX design into some sort of voting challenge here going on for years and probable for many years to come. One of the many reasons Firefox looses market share. Human-hostile design plain and simple

[krema]

Additionally, just monitor `r/firefox` where every few days somebody posts about their confusion with how pinned tabs work. For many years now. If your users clearly indicate one of your features does not make any sense for many years it is time to act.

Most recent one:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/13bklhf/why_is_pinning_a_tab_so_ridiculously_unreliable/

[fabim2001]

this would be a great option to have 

[Psk94]

I can't believe this still works in the same manner, was stupid enough to give firefox another try recently after leaving it behind many years ago, just to have this happen to me.

On what planet would anybody pin a tab and not expect it to stay there forever until unpinned, imagine if Windows did this when you pinned something to taskbar or start menu and say it crashed and you lost all your pins lmao.

Lost about 20 pinned tabs due to a browser extension opening another mini window and firefox saved that instead, cntrl+shift+n restored some weird tab history from years ago instead of what I had. This is not related to history erasing or settings, simply had a 2nd window opened that was closed in the wrong order expecting to only lose active tabs, not pinned tabs too, beyond ridiculous.

All these stupid features web browsers work on/create these days that maybe 0.01% actually use or care about, yet can't get the simple things right that actually matter to the average user.

[NorgCloud]

Make sure pinned tabs are not lost

If you configured Firefox to do not save your history, each time you close a window, your tabs are lost, forever. That is okay since you configured Firefox to work that way. BUT pinned tabs are designed to last between sessions, so they should even be saved when the history is not saved.

I have an Idea how to implement this (from the user perspective):

In "about:preferences#privacy" under "History" we currently have one Checkbox and three subordinate check-boxes. on e those is called "Clear history when [BROWSER] closes". Ad a subordinate checkbox to this one and call it "Remember pinned tabs" and activate it by default.

Sorry if my English isn't that good, its not my primary language 😅 but since FF corrected me I could blame the Browser for any mistakes 😁

[peeweek]

I am really wondering if such automatic save/restore behavior is reliable in the long term as it's clearly prone to a lot of mistakes, unintended actions from the user, etc.

Let me clarify what I understand:

1. The initial goal (at least from what people expect) is to have "common" tabs pinned and always available on some kind of "main" firefox window
2. Upon opening new windows, it becomes unclear which window is the "main" as closing them in a random order (or even when shutting down the computer closes them in an uncontrolled way)
3. Upon starting firefox, sometimes (can't figure out the repro case), another secondary window opens instead of our expected "main" window with our pins
4. There is an option to reopen previously closed windows, present in the history menu, but somehow, sometimes our "main" window disappears from this history menu.

We have clearly two distinct issues here :

1. Disappearance of old, closed, windows from the history menu, this seems more like a bug.
2. Re-opening Firefox on a random window from previous session. No matter how many windows were open, the option "Open previous windows and tabs" only opens one, I assume this is the last window that was closed.

My feeling here is that at no point I am able to tell Firefox "This is my main window, with my pins. Please save this state and reopen this window when Firefox starts"

Ideally, a simple context menu item from the tabs menu should help define which Firefox window is the main one. A feedback on the header would also be interesting to help understand which window is the main one.

However, I think that this brings more questions about this behavior:

• Does it include non-pinned tabs at the time of save/set as main ?
• Does it automatically save/restore state of the main window with "current" tabs upon close/reopen?
• Can it save state of with multiple main windows? Define "window presets" ? (this one would probably overcomplexify the system.

[FiddleDiddle]

I don't care if the pinned tabs open in every browser window every time.

[Jon]

(Note: similar ideas have been merged into this thread)