5 posts tagged with "Road to TMS 9"

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.

What is a "third-party library" and why should you care?​

TMS is not written from scratch. Like most software, it relies on a handful of external libraries — small pieces of code written by other developers that handle specific tasks so we do not have to reinvent the wheel. These libraries live inside the extension you install, and their health matters: an abandoned library means bugs get no fixes, known vulnerabilities go unpatched, and compatibility with future browser versions is not guaranteed.

Until now, TMS included two such libraries that were overdue for attention.

db.js — a quietly abandoned dependency​

db.js, written by Aaron Powell, is a small wrapper around the browser's IndexedDB storage engine. TMS uses IndexedDB to remember your suspended tabs, saved sessions, favicons, and screenshot previews. db.js was responsible for every read, write, and query against that database.

The problem: development on db.js effectively stopped in 2021. The npm package has been frozen at version 0.15.0 for years. No bug fixes, no security patches, no updates for changes in browser behavior. We were shipping dead code — and dead code carries risk.

We replaced db.js with idb, the IndexedDB wrapper maintained by Jake Archibald (a Google engineer who literally helped write the browser storage specs). idb is:

• Actively maintained, currently at version 8
• Widely used across the web platform ecosystem
• Lean, well-tested, and licensed under ISC (permissive open source)

From your perspective as a user, nothing changes. Your sessions, your suspended tabs, your settings — all of it is stored the same way in IndexedDB. The only difference is that the code that reads and writes your data is now backed by a healthy, modern library instead of an abandoned one.

html2canvas — from a 2020 release candidate to a stable release​

The second change is smaller in scope but still worth mentioning. html2canvas, the library TMS uses to generate the screenshot preview shown on suspended tab pages, was pinned at version 1.0.0-rc.7 — a release candidate from 2020. We were shipping pre-release software to everyone.

The library's author, Niklas von Hertzen, published the stable 1.4.1 release in 2022. This version includes several rendering fixes, better SVG support, and improved CORS handling. We updated to it.

For users who have the screenshot preview feature enabled in TMS settings, this may result in slightly more accurate previews on complex pages. For everyone else, there is no visible difference.

An open question for the community: do you use full-page screenshots?​

Here is where we need your input.

The screenshot preview in TMS has two modes, configurable in Settings → Preview:

• Viewport — captures only the visible portion of the page when you suspend it.
• Full page — scrolls and renders the entire page content, even below the fold.

html2canvas is the only reason TMS needs to ship a 200 KB library. The viewport mode does not actually need it at all — Chrome provides a native API (chrome.tabs.captureVisibleTab) that captures the visible area of a tab directly from the extension, with no third-party code required. Full-page screenshots, however, need html2canvas because no native browser API supports them.

So the question is: do you actually use full-page screenshots? If the vast majority of users either have previews disabled or use viewport-only mode, we could remove html2canvas entirely in a future release, replacing the viewport capture with the native Chrome API and dropping full-page support. The result would be a smaller, simpler, more maintainable extension.

We have opened a discussion on GitHub for exactly this:

👉 Discussion #381 — Which screenshot preview mode do you use in TMS?

If you have an opinion — whether you love the full-page preview or have never even turned it on — we would genuinely like to hear it. Community input is what drives these decisions.

Summary​

Library	Before	After	Why
db.js	0.15.0 (2021, abandoned)	❌ Removed	Replaced by idb v8
idb	—	8.0.3	Modern IndexedDB wrapper, actively maintained
html2canvas	1.0.0-rc.7 (2020 RC)	1.4.1 (2022 stable)	Updated; future status depends on community feedback

These changes will ship in the next TMS release. If you encounter any regressions with session storage, tab history, or screenshot previews after updating, please open an issue on GitHub.

Thank you for using TMS, and thank you — as always — for the patience you extend to a small team maintaining this project in their free time.

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.