Giovanni Solone

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.

If there is one thing TMS users have asked for more than anything else over the years, it is this: please don't let me lose my sessions. A browser profile wipe, a clean OS install, an accidental extension removal, and everything is gone. TMS has always saved sessions inside Chrome's storage, but Chrome's storage lives and dies with the browser profile.

The feature/session-backup branch changes that.

TMS has been quietly getting better for years, new bugfixes, compatibility patches, a full Manifest V3 migration, but the extension's visual identity never kept up. The settings pages still looked like a relic of 2018. The popup was fine, but only barely. Nothing matched the Marvellous Codeworks website.

That changes with TMS 9.

This is the first in a series of posts we're calling Road to TMS 9, a chance to show you what's being built on the feature branches before it ships, explain the decisions behind the changes, and hear from you before things are set in stone. Think of it as development in the open.

Today: the visual redesign.

If you are using Microsoft Edge and noticed that your suspended tabs inside tab groups disappear or turn into blank New Tab pages after a browser restart, you are running into the same Chromium-level regression that first appeared in Chrome 149, and it is now reaching Edge users too.

A targeted fix release addressing the tab group restore regression introduced by Chrome 149, where suspended tabs inside tab groups were silently discarded after a browser restart.

If you are using Chrome 149 and noticed that your suspended tabs inside tab groups turn into blank New Tab pages after a browser restart, you are not alone, and it is not your fault.

The Marvellous Suspender has been a fork since day one, born in 2021 out of The Great Suspender, at a time when that project had been pulled from the Chrome Web Store and flagged as malware. TMS cleaned up what needed cleaning and gave orphaned users somewhere to go. Fair enough, that's exactly what a fork is for.

But five years later, TMS isn't a patched-up copy of someone else's abandoned code anymore. It's had a full Manifest V3 rewrite, a proper visual redesign, its own contributors, and, as of a few months ago, a home under the Marvellous Codeworks name. The GitHub fork relationship, though, hadn't changed: technically, gioxx/MarvellousSuspender was still listed as a fork of the original repository, tied to its network, its issues, its history.

A targeted patch for Vivaldi users who were experiencing crashes related to a browser-specific API inconsistency.