Maintain tab state on group switch.

[krtkush]

Currently, all the tabs of a group reload/ load when the group is opened.

Is it possible to prevent that from happening?

[hupf]

As far as I understand, the WebExtension API does currently not provide any way to control this. The tabs.create() API also loads the page:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/tabs/create

I also encountered long loading times when switching groups. The advantage is, that tabs of not-selected groups don't eat up any memory or cpu power...

But nonetheless there are discussions about a tab hiding API, I don't know what the state of it is:
https://www.ghacks.net/2017/08/02/mozilla-makes-tab-hiding-api-a-priority/

[edouard-lopez]

Thanks for your work @hupf.

State preservation would be huge improvement, hope @Firefox move on this.

Direct link to the bug issue

[hupf]

In this article a planned tabs.discard API is mentioned.

There is also this open feature request: Support the "discarded" property inside browser.tabs.create().

[freaktechnik]

I guess you could try finding the tab using the sessions API for now, though it is almost impossible to identify the correct target to restore, since you can't go by tab id, only by url and title.

Also, discarding only unloads a tab, it doesn't hide it, hiding is a separate thing, see https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/dev-addons/2017-October/003320.html for the latest news on the API that is best suited for tab group add-ons.