6 posts tagged with "Road to TMS 9"

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.

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.