Make pinned tabs persist between windows (by default)

[nwebb]

• If a user bookmarks a page/site they are showing clear intent to keep a permanent link
• If a user pins a page they are clearly indicating that they are not yet finished with the page

Currently, the slightest mistake in FF (e.g. closing windows in the wrong order) causes the user to lose all their pinned sites. If the user notices in time they can recover these lost pins, but why should they have to, and why would a browser ever remove sites when the user is clearly indicating that they are not yet done with them? This seems extremely counter-intuitive. 

Some browsers, like Safari, now ensure that your pinned tabs appear at the top of every new window. This means that as a user you can say 'I'd like to read this later' and ensure the page(s) are (i) easily available (ii) prominently visible to serve as a reminder (iii) can be saved semi-permanently without cluttering up your bookmarks (iv) can be easily added and removed as necessary without the need to hunt through saved bookarmaks.

And if a user doesn't want this behaviour? An option to override it could be provided in which FF automatically delete the pins when it opens a new window. There could be a second option where subsequent windows simply hide pins (i.e. they only ever appear in the primary window).

This feels like it gives bookmarks and pinned pages much more defined roles.

Note: I'm still struggling to think why a user would want to pin a page if they didn't want it to persist until they unpinned it, and why they would not want a pinned page to carry over into a new browser window. 

[polarbearkev]

I agree with this!! If you have an open Firefox window and you make a pinned tab in it, then you open a second window (for whatever reason), if you accidentally close the first window...POOF!!! Your pinned tab is gone! This is ludicrous, why would you design it that way? Please fix this ASAP! I am stuck using Safari because of this issue.

They are called PINNED TABS for a reason! They're pinned, ie. they should never go away until they are unpinned by the user. 

[Guloo]

When I opened two windows, then closing the one that no pin tabs on it first, all pin tabs gone...

[krema]

The current design of discarding all pinned tabs in all windows when closing one window without pinned tabs is just the worst UX design. All other browser vendor's design teams know this, because this is how actual humans expect pined tabs to behave:

1. Pin a tab
2. Pinned tab is present in EVERY window, no matter if new window, or some other window has been closed before it.

Mozilla then makes proper UX design into some sort of voting challenge here going on for years and probable for many years to come. One of the many reasons Firefox looses market share. Human-hostile design plain and simple

[krema]

Additionally, just monitor `r/firefox` where every few days somebody posts about their confusion with how pinned tabs work. For many years now. If your users clearly indicate one of your features does not make any sense for many years it is time to act.

Most recent one:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/13bklhf/why_is_pinning_a_tab_so_ridiculously_unreliable/

[fabim2001]

this would be a great option to have 

[Psk94]

I can't believe this still works in the same manner, was stupid enough to give firefox another try recently after leaving it behind many years ago, just to have this happen to me.

On what planet would anybody pin a tab and not expect it to stay there forever until unpinned, imagine if Windows did this when you pinned something to taskbar or start menu and say it crashed and you lost all your pins lmao.

Lost about 20 pinned tabs due to a browser extension opening another mini window and firefox saved that instead, cntrl+shift+n restored some weird tab history from years ago instead of what I had. This is not related to history erasing or settings, simply had a 2nd window opened that was closed in the wrong order expecting to only lose active tabs, not pinned tabs too, beyond ridiculous.

All these stupid features web browsers work on/create these days that maybe 0.01% actually use or care about, yet can't get the simple things right that actually matter to the average user.

[NorgCloud]

Make sure pinned tabs are not lost

If you configured Firefox to do not save your history, each time you close a window, your tabs are lost, forever. That is okay since you configured Firefox to work that way. BUT pinned tabs are designed to last between sessions, so they should even be saved when the history is not saved.

I have an Idea how to implement this (from the user perspective):

In "about:preferences#privacy" under "History" we currently have one Checkbox and three subordinate check-boxes. on e those is called "Clear history when [BROWSER] closes". Ad a subordinate checkbox to this one and call it "Remember pinned tabs" and activate it by default.

Sorry if my English isn't that good, its not my primary language 😅 but since FF corrected me I could blame the Browser for any mistakes 😁

[peeweek]

I am really wondering if such automatic save/restore behavior is reliable in the long term as it's clearly prone to a lot of mistakes, unintended actions from the user, etc.

Let me clarify what I understand:

1. The initial goal (at least from what people expect) is to have "common" tabs pinned and always available on some kind of "main" firefox window
2. Upon opening new windows, it becomes unclear which window is the "main" as closing them in a random order (or even when shutting down the computer closes them in an uncontrolled way)
3. Upon starting firefox, sometimes (can't figure out the repro case), another secondary window opens instead of our expected "main" window with our pins
4. There is an option to reopen previously closed windows, present in the history menu, but somehow, sometimes our "main" window disappears from this history menu.

We have clearly two distinct issues here :

1. Disappearance of old, closed, windows from the history menu, this seems more like a bug.
2. Re-opening Firefox on a random window from previous session. No matter how many windows were open, the option "Open previous windows and tabs" only opens one, I assume this is the last window that was closed.

My feeling here is that at no point I am able to tell Firefox "This is my main window, with my pins. Please save this state and reopen this window when Firefox starts"

Ideally, a simple context menu item from the tabs menu should help define which Firefox window is the main one. A feedback on the header would also be interesting to help understand which window is the main one.

However, I think that this brings more questions about this behavior:

• Does it include non-pinned tabs at the time of save/set as main ?
• Does it automatically save/restore state of the main window with "current" tabs upon close/reopen?
• Can it save state of with multiple main windows? Define "window presets" ? (this one would probably overcomplexify the system.

[FiddleDiddle]

I don't care if the pinned tabs open in every browser window every time.

[Jon]

(Note: similar ideas have been merged into this thread)