TMS's debug page has an optional captureLogs toggle for exactly one purpose: when something goes wrong, turn it on, reproduce the issue, and send us the report. It is meant to make diagnosing problems easier, not to become the problem itself.

A few days ago, while stress-testing 9.0.3 in development with dozens of suspended tabs open and captureLogs enabled, the opposite happened: the extension itself crashed, memory exhausted, requiring a full reload to recover. That is not an acceptable outcome for a tool whose entire job is to run quietly in the background and get out of the way, let alone for an extension whose whole purpose is to lighten Chrome's memory load in the first place. What follows is the real, unedited shape of tracking that down: a first round of fixes that were genuinely necessary and genuinely not enough, followed by the investigation that found what actually needed fixing.

9.0.2 shipped a fallback for connecting Google Drive backup on Brave and Vivaldi, browsers where Chrome's own chrome.identity.getAuthToken() doesn't work. That fallback fixed the immediate problem: the connect button no longer hung indefinitely. It did not fully fix the underlying issue, and reports kept coming in of Drive accounts flipping back to "disconnected" after just one or two automatic backups. 9.0.3 replaces the fallback's mechanism entirely.

The new mascot and icon set that shipped with TMS 9 has not landed well with everyone, some of the feedback on 9.0.2 made that clear. While that discussion continues, 9.0.2 also ships a direct, no-strings-attached answer for anyone who just wants the old look back: a checkbox.

TMS 9.0.2 is ready: one new list-based feature and a handful of confirmed bug fixes. It'll be submitted for Chrome Web Store review in a few days, not today, I'm taking a short break first for family time and some mental rest, so bear with the wait. The bigger news is behind the scenes anyway: every open issue on the tracker got triaged into an actual plan.

We said it was coming in the last post, and it's here. 9.0.1 is a direct response to issue #411 and everything we admitted needed fixing there: permissions requested too early, missing opt-outs, and a couple of things that were working as intended but never explained anywhere.

TMS 9 has now reached everyone on the Chrome Web Store's normal rollout schedule. Good news, mostly. But an update this size doesn't land quietly, and a few things landed in our inbox that deserve a direct answer instead of a buried reply in a GitHub thread.

Five weeks ago we opened this series with a new look for a new era. Google just cleared v9.0.0 for review, and starting Monday morning, August 3rd, the rollout to the Chrome Web Store begins. This is the last stop on the road.

It's also pushing about 40°C outside as we write this, summer in full swing, and yes, 40°C in Italy is exactly as absurd as it sounds. Wherever you are, we hope you get a good stretch of vacation out of it. We won't really be taking one ourselves, but we'll admit to easing off the throttle a little.

We spent the last few posts chasing a Chromium regression across three browsers: it broke grouped tabs on Chrome 149, reached Edge shortly after, and was finally fixed upstream in Chrome 150. That last post also introduced the plan for Brave, which does not follow Chrome's release schedule and might stay affected for a while: TMS 9's new Tab Health page can detect and repair the broken tabs on demand, without waiting for Brave to catch up.

This week we actually ran that repair on a Brave profile with tab groups in a broken state, and it is worth showing rather than just describing.

When Chrome 149 introduced a regression that silently discarded suspended tabs inside tab groups on every browser restart, TMS shipped a workaround in version 8.1.4. When the same regression reached Microsoft Edge, we addressed that too. We knew from the start that these were stopgap measures, the right fix had to come from the browser itself.

It is now here. Chrome 150.0.7871.47 ships the browser-side patch for crbug.com/522338670. Tab groups restore correctly without any intervention from TMS. We have verified this with a clean restart session and multiple group configurations, and everything behaves as expected.

Here is what that means for TMS, and what we decided to do with the workaround code.

TMS 9 is shaping up to be one of the most significant releases in the extension's history, if you have been following along, you already know about the automatic session backups and the Google Drive integration we covered in the previous posts. But not all of the work that goes into a release shows up in the changelog. Some of the most important changes happen completely out of sight, and this one is a good example of that. We replaced two third-party libraries that had been silently aging inside the extension, and we want to be transparent about what changed and why.