Tab Shelf 2024.3.3 is now rolling out to existing users and is now available to install via the Chrome Web Store.
v2024.3.3 brings a large number of improvements and bug fixes, as well as an all-new onboarding experience for new users. 4 new languages have also been added: Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Hungarian.
This release does not introduce any permissions changes. This release also does not introduce any external API calls, nor does it rely on third-party services.
This blog post will cover the main highlights of this release. To see the full changelog, please visit the ‘Changelog’ page.
New onboarding and privacy
As part of a new effort to put greater emphasis on privacy and to be more transparent about permissions usage, the new onboarding experience now has a page dedicated to it.
You will find that it explains how Tab Shelf does not and will never collect and redistribute/sell your information. It also includes the new nutrition facts sheet for permissions usage so that you can see how Tab Shelf uses its access to your tab information responsibly.
Existing users will also be able to access the new privacy information from within the side panel itself, by going to Settings, scrolling to the bottom, and clicking on ‘Privacy and Permissions’.
Performance improvements
Several performance issues relating to regular expression grouping rules, introduced in v2024.3.0 and v2024.3.2, were found to have caused a performance regression.
Opening new tabs with sites that are target by grouping rules caused the browser’s main process to reach 100% CPU usage and seemingly remain at that level anywhere between half an hour to several hours.
This issue has been fixed in v2024.3.3 where Tab Shelf no longer delegates grouping rules execution to the extension’s service worker. If a regular expression test on the new tab’s URL takes too long, Tab Shelf will stop that test.
Tab Shelf will also no longer test site URLs against rules immediately. Previously, rules were run for all tab events; and this caused severe performance degradations if regular expression rules caused the service worker to hang. It will now wait a few milliseconds for tab opening and update events to accumulate before running the rules (this is known as debouncing).
Gathering feedback
A major issue for the Tab Shelf project has been the gathering of user feedback. Previously, the only methods of sending feedback have been via the Chrome Web Store (either through the user support flow or by leaving a review) or sending an email to me.
In v2024.3.3, a feedback button has been added in Settings. Also, when a user uninstalls Tab Shelf, an uninstall survey will open asking for feedback on their experience with Tab Shelf.
I could only guess from the privacy debacle with v2024.3.0 and the near-zero direct feedback I received from it that users are very, very reluctant to reveal their identity to strangers (me).
The new feedback form does not reveal the user’s identity and is anonymous, unless the user decides to provide their email in an optional question for follow ups to their feedback submission.
Gathering user feedback will be an important priority for the project moving forward, alongside privacy. Nearly all bugs found were found by me during my experience of using Tab Shelf in my free time or at work. There are likely some usage scenarios which I may never have thought of or tried myself which may bring up bugs, so I would be extremely grateful if these could be reported as soon as possible.