Also Ctrl+Shift+W closes such window when there are only pinned tabs even If I have set:

browser.sessionstore.warnOnQuit true

browser.warnOnQuit true

We won't need more reports that this bug is still happening. It will continue to happen until a patch gets landed here.

I keep hitting this myself - my scenario is that there are always GMail or GCal windows that were opened separately, left in the background that close last just because I don't notice they exist until I close the main Firefox Window - super frustrating.
Jesse recently found out that pinned tabs are low penetration altough once used really help users discover the value of the browser (one of these features that lead to an increase in retention) and stick with it. I think this should be considered a churn driver.
Do we know the level of effort involved in fixing this?

From reading the comments it sounds like it's unclear what the correct thing to do here is, so the fix could be easy or hard, depending on what we decide to do. I think the bug needs a decision from UX before we can move forward on it, but Dao is the triage owner and has been involved in it for about 10 years now, so I'll leave the final judgement to him.

(Also, is it really a churn driver if it has low penetration? 😉 Perhaps, if we start to publicize it so that people use it more…)

Here's a non-advocating rephrase of my suggestion:

Every new window the user opens should have the same pinned tabs, but these are special tabs which don't load anything until you put them in focus. This solves the issue IMO. How it's structured now, is much too sensitive. Like other users have said, it should matter the order in which windows are closed.

Imagine if you had a bookmarks toolbar, but the individual bookmarks were bound only to the window that you saved them in. Or a browser extension that was only bound to one window, and it only saves if that is the last window you close (or whatever). This doesn't make any sense, right? Pinned tabs should get the same scope as other features like this.

*should not matter the order

(In reply to differenceclouds from comment #126)

Here's a non-advocating rephrase of my suggestion:

Every new window the user opens should have the same pinned tabs, but these are special tabs which don't load anything until you put them in focus. This solves the issue IMO. How it's structured now, is much too sensitive. Like other users have said, it should matter the order in which windows are closed.

Imagine if you had a bookmarks toolbar, but the individual bookmarks were bound only to the window that you saved them in. Or a browser extension that was only bound to one window, and it only saves if that is the last window you close (or whatever). This doesn't make any sense, right? Pinned tabs should get the same scope as other features like this.

It sounds ok in principal but the example of bookmarks and pinned tabs are not very comparable. E.g. I have about 8-10 pinned tabs that take up about 15-20 percent of my horizontal space. I'm ok with it because they appear only in the "main" window - if they start appearing in every window, that'll eat up space that I don't want to lose in every window.

The idea isn't that complicated in my IMHO:

1. Pinned tabs should not get lost no matter which window is closed last. They are called pinned for a reason.
2. If a window is already showing pinned tabs, opening new windows shouldn't show them.

I think the issue is that there isn't a main window currently. How the feature is now, you can have a different set of pinned tabs for every window you open, and firefox doesn't know which set is more important (unless you close one of the windows). Maybe there's someone out there that absolutely needs to have multiple sets of pinned tabs across multiple windows which open every session, but.... I kind of doubt it?

• My favored compromise would be this: The browser designates one main window at the beginning of a session. Have only one "set" of pinned tabs available. And then, for new windows which open, the pinned tabs are collapsed or hidden somehow, per a user preference. So that way, they don't take up too much room in new windows if that is an issue for some users.

• Another compromise would be to disable the ability to pin tabs in any but the designated main window. if you close the main window, it will still come back if you restart the browser. Or perhaps, if you close the main window, the pinned tabs appear in the next window down. This feels... a bit arbitrary or half-baked, but still solves the issue.

Preserving multiple sets of tabs gets messy, and feels more like the realm of some type of specialized extension.

Apologies the quoting got mixed up (I should learn to preview before submitting). Re-formatting below.

I think the issue is that there isn't a main window currently. How the feature is now, you can have a different set of pinned tabs for every window you open, and firefox doesn't know which set is more important (unless you close one of the windows).

Interesting - I hadn't thought from this perspective of different sets of pinned tabs in each window.

Maybe there's someone out there that absolutely needs to have multiple sets of pinned tabs across multiple windows which open every session, but.... I kind of doubt it?

See last paragraph below.

My favored compromise would be this: The browser designates one main window at the beginning of a session. Have only one "set" of pinned tabs available. And then, for new windows which open, the pinned tabs are collapsed or hidden somehow, per a user preference. So that way, they don't take up too much room in new windows if that is an issue for some users.

Right now, if I have pinned tabs in my first window and I open a new window, I don't see those pinned tabs in the second window - so I don't think there is any requirement to collapse or hide as they are already not available/visible.

Another compromise would be to disable the ability to pin tabs in any but the designated main window. if you close the main window, it will still come back if you restart the browser. Or perhaps, if you close the main window, the pinned tabs appear in the next window down. This feels... a bit arbitrary or half-baked, but still solves the issue.

Suppose a user has multiple windows opened with different set of pinned tabs in each of them:

• if the user quits via Ctrl+Q then upon next start, restore all of the windows with their respective pinned tabs
• however, if the user is closing those windows one by one, then the pinned tabs on the last window "win" because Firefox has no way of determining which is the "main" window whose pinned tabs should be restored.

Suppose a user has multiple windows opened with different set of pinned tabs in each of them:

• if the user quits via Ctrl+Q then upon next start, restore all of the windows with their respective pinned tabs
• however, if the user is closing those windows one by one, then the pinned tabs on the last window "win" because Firefox has no way of determining which is the "main" window whose pinned tabs should be restored.

What you're describing here is very close to, or exactly how firefox already behaves. If you close a window with pinned tabs before one without, the one without "wins." Even if that last window with pinned tabs "wins," what if another window with its pinned tabs was the one the user actually wanted to save? It might sound like I'm describing an edge case here, but I'm just trying to show that the logic of the feature as it stands is... bad

I maintain that the ability for every window to have its own pinned tabs is the issue here, and that there should instead only be one set available. This set should be scoped with greater importance than an individual window, and whether or not this set appears in new windows should be a user preference.

Anyone feel me here? The logic of maintaining multiple sets of pinned tabs for windows which may or may not exist in the future is messy.

There must be some kind of routine that stores the pinned tabs of the last window you close, so they can be restored the next time you start Firefox.

What if we modify it to run every time a window is closed, rather than for the last window only. It should transfer the pinned tabs to another window (the one that would gain focus next) any time a window is closed. Only when there is no more window available to transfer the tabs to (because the window is the last/only one), the pinned tabs are saved to be restored on the next startup of Firefox.
This way no pinned tabs would get lost, but users are still able to have different pinned tabs in different windows. There's also no problem with duplicate tabs, as would be if every window showed the same pinned tabs.

Probably this routine already runs every time a window is closed, no matter if it is the last one or not. It simply overwrites the list of stored pinned tabs every time a window is closed with the tabs that are currently pinned to this specific window. So it would be even easier to just change this routine by adding a step that moves the pinned tabs to the next available window, if another window is available.

What if we modify it to run every time a window is closed, rather than for the last window only. It should transfer the pinned tabs to another window (the one that would gain focus next) any time a window is closed. Only when there is no more window available to transfer the tabs to (because the window is the last/only one), the pinned tabs are saved to be restored on the next startup of Firefox.
This way no pinned tabs would get lost, but users are still able to have different pinned tabs in different windows. There's also no problem with duplicate tabs, as would be if every window showed the same pinned tabs.

In this scenario, old, closed sets of pinned tabs would have to reappear, sequentially, as the user opens new windows. And when a new session is started, every old set would have to reappear. And, say a user doesn't want a particular set of pinned tabs anymore. They would have to unpin every tab, individually, in that particular window. Or an "unpin all tabs for this window" command could be added.

All of this interferes with the "restore previous session" option, creating two intersecting hierarchies of what should be restored from the previous session, how many windows are restored, etc.

All I'm saying is, if the goal is to preserve pinned tabs, it is a much cleaner solution to implement, and to actually use, if there is only one set available. And just to restate a detail of my ideal, I think that, at the beginning of a session, pinned tabs should not load their contents until the user clicks on them. This saves memory usage.

As strange as the requirement to have different sets of pinned tabs in different windows seemed to me at first, I can imagine users that use that capability. A real estate agent might, for example, need to have two windows up all the time on a wide monitor, with various maps on pinned tabs on the left one, and pinned tabs for real estate sites on the right one.

What I see as the problem is that pinned tabs are silently discarded when you close their window if any other windows are open. How about displaying a warning/confirmation box in that scenario: "This window has pinned tabs, and closing it while any other Firefox windows are open will discard them." with three buttons: "Discard this window with its pinned tabs", "Exit Firefox", and "Cancel"? That should be easy to implement, let different sets of pinned tabs continue to be possible, and prevent accidental pinned tab lossage.

The original complaint is still an issue as if me typing this.

Have pinned tabs in Main window.
Drag a tab into its own window for clarity.
Close main window before the additional window.
Next opening of Firefox will be sans pinned tabs.

I am using Firefox Developer's Edition on Windows 10 Pro x64 and I have it so no tabs are restored when I open Firefox the after closing it down fully.

What needs to happen is pinned tabs simply need to always be restored. If you have pinned tabs over multiple windows then they all come back with the single window return. some individuals may have an issue with that but I feel they may be expecting something different from pinned tabs than what they are designed to do. This is fair enough as it is their browser experience and they can use it however they want, but constraining the functionality of their advertised and intended use seems ill-advised.

"Pinned Tabs allow you to always keep your favorite web apps like Facebook, Gmail and Twitter open and just a click away. Pinned Tabs are small, can't be closed accidentally and open automatically when you start Firefox."

This just happened to me again, and it's so frustrating. It's pretty unreal that this bug has been around for 11 years and still isn't fixed. I'd say about once every month or two I make the mistake of closing my main Firefox window (The one containing my pinned tabs) to install updates or some other task that requires logging out, rebooting, etc, only to discover there was another Firefox window hiding underneath that main window that I didn't know about. Now all my pinned tabs are gone forever and there is no way to recover them.

I understand the "correct" way to exit Firefox is to click the hamburger menu then go down and select "Quit". But users shouldn't have to learn the "correct" way to exit every app they use. It's just muscle memory to click that red "X" in the corner since every other app behaves correctly when you close it that way, and even Firefox behaves correctly so long as your window with pinned tabs is the last window you close. I really shouldn't have to be that careful about the order in which I close windows.

And sometimes it's accidental. On Ubuntu the big red "X" to close the window is very close to the system tray when the window is maximized. It's so easy to be aiming for the volume or network/VPN settings, etc and accidentally close the window instead. And you better hope when you accidentally close it that there weren't any other Firefox windows open otherwise you've lost all your pinned tabs forever, again.

This issue results in a very poor user experience for some of Mozilla's most loyal user base.

Now all my pinned tabs are gone forever and there is no way to recover them.

You can restore other windows by Control+Shift+N, even after session restore. This has been a workaround for me, although I hope it be easier later.

(In reply to Kagami :saschanaz from comment #142)

Now all my pinned tabs are gone forever and there is no way to recover them.

You can restore other windows by Control+Shift+N, even after session restore. This has been a workaround for me, although I hope it be easier later.

THANK YOU! I was about to get really frustrated, but this brought my pinned tabs back.
@Mozilla: it looks REALLY bad that this 11 year old bug is still relevant, despite this hidden workaround.

Hello,
I know this is an old thread but this is the first and most applicable entry regarding my problem, so I figured I would post here before creating a new entry.

I use the "Active Pinned Tab" add-on to achieve something similar to what is described above, to have special pinned tabs that are expected to be visible on every window.

This addon will simply make current pinned tabs jump to any other firefox getting the focus.

The effect, imagine you have your emails in one tab, well now it is on every one of your windows, on the top left side all the time.

This however introduces two bugs including this one "my pinned tabs get closed when I close a window"

Here the pinned tabs should be on every window, however due to current engine limitation, the specific tab icon can only exist on one window at a time.

This issues has been raised with the developer of Active Pinned Tab

https://github.com/BlackGlory/active-pinned-tab/issues/4

His answer is " this is not achievable" because of a browser limitation

There is also another related bug that would be fixed by the solution to this issue.

That issue is that when you click on another window to give it focus, all the tab locations will shift to the right because it adds new pinned tabs.
The expectation for the user is that the tabs are always on all windows at the same time. But since "Active pinned tabs" work by shifting the pinned tabs around on focus events, well that makes the tabs shift.

https://github.com/BlackGlory/active-pinned-tab/issues/3

This is very disconcerting when you move your cursor to another monitor and click on a tab in another, not currently focused window.
When you do this, the tabs will shift before your click is registered.

This causes the click to land on the wrong place. Most often it will simply select the tab adjacent to the one you clicked on.
In other cases it will click on the X of one of the tabs and close it !

I think the special active tabs that are meant to appear on all windows should be a feature of the engine.
As the developer of active pinned tabs would not add the feature even if firefox engine would allow it.

bug 1751665 says it's a duplicate of this bug.

Redirect a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user to the triage owner.
:dao, since the bug has high severity and recent activity, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 28 duplicates, 66 votes and 105 CCs.
:dao, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Hello,

This thread is very big but here's an easy way to know what it's about.

Imagine you have a music player tab.

You don't want more than one actively playing music player tab.

You don't want to search for this tab all the time, it should always be in the upper left hand corner.

So you pin it.

But it's only pin to one window.

You want to interact with your music player, you have to find on which window it is at every time.

And if you choose that window, music stops

Solution, you install active pinned ta a add-on.

Now the music tabs follows the focused window.

This is annoying because now, everytime you click to focus a window, all the tabs shift around.

But worse, every time you close a window, your music tab gets closed along with it.

What we need is native pinned tabs that are pinned to all windows at the same time.

And there exists an example of this Firefox View.

We just need to be able to make any tab into a permanent pinned on all window tab just like Firefox View.

Firefox View was introduced in October 2022

Hi!

We are currently evaluating an approach that has been suggested in this bug: make pinned tabs a Firefox-level variable instead of a window-level variable.

In practice, this would mean that:

• pinned tabs are pinned to all opened windows. Incognito windows are the only exception.
• pinned tabs are synced. If you:
  • open Window 1 and 2,
  • add a pinned tab X in Window 1,
  • switch to Window 2, the tab X is already pinned, but not loaded until it's clicked upon.

If you commented about this bug in the past, it would be super helpful if you can share your thoughts on the following questions we have:

1. What are your thoughts about this potential change in pinned tabs behavior? Are there situations in which you would find "persistent" tabs inconvenient?
2. In what situations do you use pinned tabs?
   Do they play the role of static bookmarks or reminders to return to a task? Or do you pin tabs from which you navigate to other pages often?
3. How important it is for you to sync pinned tabs state perfectly? E.g., if you navigate from a pinned tab to another URL, do you expect that state to be synced to the same pinned tab in another window?

I often have over 500 to 1000 tabs open across 5-10 window
And I'm very annoyed trying to find a tab in all this.
Some tabs should always be in the upper left corner and always in the same order

As you can see in this screenshot
https://i.imgur.com/X8CkOEW.jpg

I would right away put these tabs in
Tab manager plus
music player
email
virtual machine manager
chatgpt
SMS
facebook messenger

Try add-on active pinned tabs, it's almost the right thing, except whenever you change window focus, all the tabs position shift horizontally and that's super annoying so I don't use it.

Also, to take the idea further, I would like to stack some of these, I would stack email/sms/facebook on a single icon, click it then click email, just to save tab space

By far, having Tab Manager Plus always in the same place would be nice, although I got used to having that one always immediately to the left of my address bar, it should always have been in the upper left corner.

Hi Ania,

What are your thoughts about this potential change in pinned tabs behavior?

I've been following this bug for 12 years. This sounds like exactly the behavior I've been wanting for 12 years.

Are there situations in which you would find "persistent" tabs inconvenient?

I can't imagine one.

In what situations do you use pinned tabs?

I do not currently use pinned tabs on my primary machine. I used to use pinned tabs avidly. However, when I switched to a multi-monitor setup, I'd regularly find myself breaking a tab off (typically something like YouTube for a separate full video window on one window while doing my primary browsing on another), and doing so would regularly result in me closing things "in the wrong order" and I'd lose my pinned tabs.

My primary, and only use case for pinned tabs is for "web apps" I might want to keep open in the background, e.g., webmail, my RSS reader, Reddit, etc. I still use them on my laptop (single monitor) for this exact purpose.

How important it is for you to sync pinned tabs state perfectly? E.g., if you navigate from a pinned tab to another URL, do you expect that state to be synced to the same pinned tab in another window?

I don't think this is that important, and trying to do it would likely be impossible. For certain apps, I think it would be a very hard problem (e.g. if I'm writing an email, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that that state be in sync across browser windows; if I have the windows at two different resolutions and the app maintains state differently, that could cause big problems for syncing).

Really, what I want from pinned tabs is an auto loading set of bookmarks that's present for all windows. To give an example, if I pin a table at "example.com/foo", and then navigate to "example.com/bar" in my current window, then open a new window, I want "example.com/foo" to be what shows up in the new window.

I should clarify, when I say "auto loading", I don't mean the tab actually being loaded, just that the tab button is on the tab strip (the lazy loading, "wait until you click on it before actually loading a new copy" behavior sounds perfect for my case of something like a video player in a new window).

(In reply to Ania from comment #153)
I think I would find the proposed change very disruptive. I have one window open with 8 pinned tabs, and I use this to access the webapps I work with every day (e.g. email client, GitHub, ticket handling app). Other tabs on that window get used for various short-term purposes. Sometimes I move these tabs to new windows, where I open more tabs. I don't want my pinned tabs to appear on these other windows and waste horizontal space. And if they did appear but their content was not identical on all windows I reckon I would easily get confused about which window I am in mid-activity on for each app.

(In reply to Ania from comment #153)

• pinned tabs are pinned to all opened windows. Incognito windows are the only exception.
• pinned tabs are synced. If you:
  • open Window 1 and 2,
  • add a pinned tab X in Window 1,
  • switch to Window 2, the tab X is already pinned, but not loaded until it's clicked upon.

I welcome the proposed change because it would bring consistency and predictability to tab pinning.

That being said, it would disrupt my current workflow which consists of me having at least two separate Firefox windows open, one for work (with pinned tabs for work-related stuff) and one for leisure (with pinned tabs for social media, nextcloud, etc.).

However, I think I’d be willing to to move to a multi-profile/multi-instance setup where I have separate Firefox profiles for work and leisure for the benefit of the greater good (less confusing behavior for most users). On a related note: it should be simpler than resorting to the command-line to open a new Firefox instance with a separate Profile…

If you commented about this bug in the past, it would be super helpful if you can share your thoughts on the following questions we have:

1. What are your thoughts about this potential change in pinned tabs behavior? Are there situations in which you would find "persistent" tabs inconvenient?

(see above)

2. In what situations do you use pinned tabs?
   Do they play the role of static bookmarks or reminders to return to a task? Or do you pin tabs from which you navigate to other pages often?

Almost always the second. I use pinned tabs almost exclusively for sites that are application-like (social media, groupware, intranet portal, nextcloud).

3. How important it is for you to sync pinned tabs state perfectly? E.g., if you navigate from a pinned tab to another URL, do you expect that state to be synced to the same pinned tab in another window?

I can imagine it making sense to completely share pinned tabs across all windows, meaning those are just two separate views into the same tab instance. Same DOM tree, same JS heap. Not synced but de-duplicated, so that clicking into a pinned tab on a new window will not lead to increased memory usage that won’t go away until the window is closed. I don’t know if that’s feasible with the current architecture, though…

My pinned tabs are basically things that would have been apps in my OS taskbar had the ecosystem better supported PWA, such as email and calendar. The change as described would work and would not be detrimental for me, but...

It's not that I need pinned tabs in other windows. Not at all. The actual underlying problem is that in my workflow there is a "main" Firefox window, and most of the time closing it shuts down Firefox, but if a random window is open something entirely different happens. That is the real problem for me personally, and making pinned tabs global would only address one part of the underlying problem. Losing the pinned tabs when I accidentally close several windows in the wrong order was the main reason I voted for this issue.

If you do go this route, I feel it has to be literally the same tab in all windows. Not a separate tab open to the same URL, even if it's carefully "synced" somehow. If it's a JS-heavy app and I click something, I would expect it to be reflected no matter which window I'm viewing the pinned tab in. Otherwise the overall result would probably be more frustrating than the current situation.