Saved sessions are opened with pinned tabs
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TL;DR - How do I make session tabs open as regular, unpinned tabs?
Just heard of and downloaded Vivaldi today, absolutely loving it so far. If I'm not mistaken, the purpose of the "save tabs as session" feature is to save a set of tabs for later use (say, if I went online shopping and visited ~50 tabs with products I'm interested in, but want to go over them one more time with my wife before making the order, that would be extremely useful).
There's an issue though: when I open the previously saved session, all of the session's tabs are opened as pinned tabs, instead of just regular tabs. This is strange and unexplainable to me, for there's no reason I'd like to pin a tab that is already accessible as part of a session. If the session indeed contains 50 tabs (or more), why would I want them all pinned? It's very uncomfortable since I'd probably like to see the tab titles while working, and also each time I'm finished with one of the session tabs and want to get rid of it, I'll have to unpin it and only then close it.
But the issue is much more severe. Even if I check "open session in new window" and continue working on the session in a separate window, then when I'm done and close the session's window, all session tabs are automatically added to my main window as pinned tabs. That's horrible, because now I have 50 tabs to unpin and then to close. All of that gets especially tricky because of the behavior of pinned tabs, which cannot be closed unless they're unpinned (which by itself I think is a desirable behavior).
I looked all over the browser's settings and searched for a similar question online but found nothing. What's the deal here? How do I make session tabs open as regular, unpinned tabs? (which I think should be the default behavior anyway)?
Thanks in advance to my replier.
Idan -
@idansass The default behaviour of saved sessions is to save pinned tabs as pinned, and unpinned tabs as unpinned.
The default for saving sessions is to save all tabs in all windows, so make sure that you check the box to save only the tabs in the current window.
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@Pesala thanks for your quick reply!
Hmm ok, so I guess I found a bug. If a window has some pinned tabs, and I save a few tabs - all of which are originally unpinned - to a session, the session is saved as if all selected tabs were pinned (although they weren't). To be clear, none of the pinned tabs was selected for the session.
As a workaround for now, I will always use a separate window (which doesn't have my regularly pinned tabs) when I work on tabs that I intend to save for later. It's not the best solution, but it's workable.
The "save only tabs in the current window" is irrelevant in my case because I manually selected the tabs I want for the session (so they're all in the same window anyway, I don't see the checkbox you mentioned). -
@idansass I can confirm the bug. Saving selected tabs as a session from a window with pinned tabs saves the tabs in the session as pinned.
Please see How to Report a Bug
This link is now on the Help menu, Report a Bug.
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@Pesala great, thank you!
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@idansass Welcome to Vivaldi. Since you're looking to make use of sessions I have a few suggestions to enhance your experience with them.
There are 2 extensions which really improve the feature, prior to finding them Sessions was nothing more than a backup of state for me. Now they've become a truly useful feature where I, as you noted, use them to save a bunch of tabs related to a project or task that I intend to visit later, but I do not intend for them to be longterm bookmarks and this prevents them from cluttering my bookmarks library.
For saving, accessing and managing my sessions I use the Advanced Panels Mod (with Sessions Panel). The extension enables you to create some powerful dynamic panels, and comes with the sessions panel as a preinstalled example. That panel is what really enabled me to include sessions as part of my workflow.
Another extremely useful extension is the Autosave Sessions Mod. This will save your current session every X minutes, and keep the Y most recent autosaved sessions, X & Y being configurable. This is what people find they should have installed when they accidentally close >25 tabs (the trash can holds 25 items). It's a nice way to have an automatic backup of your current state. I have mine configured to save every 20 minutes and keep 10. So if I make a mistake or encounter a catastrophic error, I have my most recent state from no more than 20 minutes ago, and if it takes me a while to realize the error I have sessions covering the previous 3 hours.
Now, with your issues. Looks like you found a bug that occurs when saving a session with pinned tabs in it. Strangely, I cannot reproduce this. I tried a few scenarios on the latest version of Vivaldi on Windows 10:
- open an old saved session that contains both pinned and unpinned tabs in a new window
- results: new window created with both pinned and unpinned tabs as expected.
- saved a new session with both pinned and unpinned tabs, closed the window, then opened that session in a new window
- results: same as before, as expected
- open an old session with no pinned tabs in a new window
- results: new window created and all tabs are unpinned as expected.
@idansass said in Saved sessions are opened with pinned tabs:
each time I'm finished with one of the session tabs and want to get rid of it, I'll have to unpin it and only then close it.
There is a setting in the Tabs settings to choose the behavior of pinned tabs. You seem to have them protected from being closed. The primary purpose of pinning tabs is to make it so they don't move -- they are "pinned" in place, which is the top. Creating or closing other tabs which are not pinned don't effect the position of pinned tabs so they are always easy to find.
Many people find that having pinned tabs protected from being closed is very useful. If you're repeatedly tapping the keyboard shortcut for 'close tab' you won't accidentally close your pinned tabs. Same is true for other actions like 'close other tabs' -- which if that protection is enabled will close all the tabs in the same window which are not the active tab and are not pinned; if the protection is disabled then pinned tabs will close just like all the others.
If you find this to be a hindrance, then simply change the setting to the behavior you desire (there's a third option if I recall correctly but I don't remember it's specific purpose off the top of my head).
Even if I check "open session in new window" and continue working on the session in a separate window, then when I'm done and close the session's window, all session tabs are automatically added to my main window as pinned tabs.
So there's two things here. One is that when pinned tabs have been protected from being closed, they won't be closed unless you're exiting the program. So even closing the window won't close them and instead they'll be moved to another window
The other is that there's a bug in this behavior such that pinned tabs are being moved when a window is closed regardless of that setting. So that's going to happen until the issue is fixed. Actually now that I say that, I think there's been a new release since we discussed that issue recently, but I don't know whether or not a change for that wasd included. It would have been a very fast turn around if so, so I presume the bug still exists.
Hope that helps. One last thing, as you're new you're likely unfamiliar with how to install mods. There is a pinned thread in the Modifications category of this forum that explains everything you need to know in order to make use of mods.
Mods are one of three distinguishing features of Vivaldi that separates it from other browsers. Mods are basically native code, as opposed to extensions which act as add-ons. That means the types of things that are possible goes beyond what one can achieve with extensions. In some cases it allows users to gain functionality that has been requested as a new feature, meaning we don't have to wait an unknown time for something that might not arrive anyways.
The Vivaldi dev team is very small when compared to other browsers. While they do a great job of responding to user's requests, they have limited resources to do so. You won't find them hanging out in the forums, occasionally they'll post here about important things. Mostly, this is a community effort, users helping users, with a select group of volunteers who moderate the forum or have additional insight into the internal processes and can pass along necessary info to the team when needed.
Happy surfing!
Edit: fixed links
- open an old saved session that contains both pinned and unpinned tabs in a new window
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@BoneTone said in Saved sessions are opened with pinned tabs:
Strangely, I cannot reproduce this.
It only happens when saving selected tabs as a session.
- Pin one or more tabs in a window
- Select one or more unpinned tabs
- Save the selected tabs as a session
- Reopen the saved session.
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@idansass Can you confirm that you report this bug and send VB number?
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