"Recently Closed" list order not updating on Chrome/Catalina

[mQkatz]

On Chrome v. 83.0.4103.61, on Mac OS Catalina (10.15.3), I'm consistently seeing that my most-recently-closed tabs do not appear at the top of the list. Instead, the top gets clogged with certain tabs that I closed earlier – sometimes hours earlier, and sometimes as duplicate entries.

In case this helps: The tab names that clog the top of the list seem to be (mostly or always) Google Docs that are shared within my company's hosted Google Suite. Disabling/enabling (or removing/restoring) the Quick Tabs extension clears the stale entries – but that obviously discards the whole tabs history, so it's not a solution.

For comparison, Quick Tabs is working perfectly for me on all recent Firefox versions (e.g., 76.0.1 ). But I'm not opening work-related Google Docs in Firefox.

Thanks for any insight into why this is happening! I love the extension, and it's a surprise not to be able to rely on its sort order.

[mQkatz]

@babyman I love this extension, but this weird bug has made it borderline unusable for me on Chrome. (It still works flawlessly on Firefox.) Any suggestions for debugging the cause, or trying a workaround? Many thanks.

[babyman]

Strange, thanks for following up on this. The closed tabs list shouldn't get reordered, tabs are added to the beginning of the list and then resized back to its max size.

I just want to check, this is happening when the search box is empty:

since the tabs will be reordered (within their section) once you start typing.

[mQkatz]

Hi Evan: Thanks for looking at this. (You quickly helped me debug my only previous Quick Tabs glitch – where removing all keyboard shortcuts had broken the extension's behavior.)

The Recently Closed list (which is all that interests me) does change when I start typing into the search box. But not in any especially meaningful way. The items that populate right under Recently Closed aren't particularly recent. Also, they aren't particularly relevant – i.e., they're matching substrings somewhere within the content, whereas I'm trying to match what I remember: a page title.

I also just noticed that the top "Open Tabs" list isn't accurate either. It shows only a subset of the tabs I have open.

By contrast, on Firefox, the "Open Tabs" list is accurate, and the Recently Closed list automatically keeps itself up to date, promoting the most-recently-closed tab titles to the top as expected.

Also, I've just confirmed that Quick Tabs' Recently Closed list is working as expected on:

• Chrome on Mojave.
• Chrome on High Sierra.
• Chrome on the same Catalina machine where I'm experiencing this glitch – except, in a separate Chrome session where I'm logged in with a "personal" profile.

Common to all these ^ three environments: Limited history of pages viewed. And limited or no viewing of corporate GSuite or Atlassian pages.

So in case this helps: It seemingly isolates the glitch to the Chrome/Catalina session where I'm logged in with my workplace Google SSO persona, and where I've loaded lots of Google Docs/Sheets, Jira, and Confluenza pages. I seem to recall that what first spammed the top of the Recently Closed list were GDocs on the same Google SSO account. (These were sometimes multiple copies of the same GDoc – a GDoc closed hours before I closed other tabs that are entirely missing from the Recently Closed list.)

Thanks again, and please let me know if I can do anything else to help you reproduce this – and/or, if you have any ideas for working around it. I've tried disabling/re-enabling and removing/reinstalling the extension, but it keeps coming back with the same glitch. Logging out/into the Chrome browser also doesn't help.

[babyman]

Quick question, are the search settings the same between each of the browser instances?

These settings can make a huge difference to the search results.

[mQkatz]

Yes, identical:

[mQkatz]

But wait: Haven't I already told you you're brilliant, the last time you debugged this great extension for me?

I misread your email at first, and conformed all the non-matching settings on my broken session to match my working session. And I think this unblocked the Recently Closed list to work properly again! If that holds up, one of these changes was the fix.

I'll be 🤦 if this was a shortcut-key bug again.

[mQkatz]

@babyman This is all fixed now. And I strongly suspect the root problem was (like last time) some weird artifact of keyboard shortcuts.

If Google/Chrome has pre-empted all keyboard-shortcut settings in the extension(?), I wonder whether it would be advantageous to just rip them out? They seem to be the one point of brittleness, plus users can no longer configure them here. Thanks again for your help.

[babyman]

I'm glad you got that sorted out, do you think it was the keyboard code that was the cause of the issue? or some combination of the settings above?

I wonder if there is a more robust way to handle the keyboard shortcuts, it's been ages since I looked at how best to handle them.

[mQkatz]

False non-alarm: The Recently Closed list got clogged again. 🤦 Still debugging. I've disabled/enabled the extension, and set/reset some of the options. I'll let you know if/when I locate the actual trigger.

[stale[bot]]

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