Workona’s new tab management system has been rebuilt from the ground up in order to deliver the most reliable & intuitive experience yet!
If we’ve done our job correctly, you’ll barely notice anything change. Everything should just work better! If you want details on some of the major improvements, keep reading.
No more duplicated tabs in an unsaved space: If you’re among the unlucky few that have had an unsaved space appear in your sidebar containing a duplicate set of all of your open spaces’ tabs (e.g. google.com +99 more), then you know one of the main motivations for our new system all too well! We’re happy to say this problem will be impossible in our new system.
Tab groups support: Native support for tab groups is coming to the Workona Tab Manager extension, so the Tab Groups Helper extension will no longer be required. Not only that, but tab groups data will be stored in the cloud with the space’s session, which means they will be restored far more reliably, as well as synced across devices!
Robust backup & restore system: Our new tiered snapshot system will help ensure you will always be able to recover your work in the case of a browser crash or unexpected bug. Our previous session backup system stored 10 recent snapshots within spaces, but since many new snapshots can be generated in a short period of time, users occasionally overwrote the backups that contained their lost work simply by continuing to work within that space; not ideal. Our new system solves this problem with multiple tiers of snapshots, with a snapshot of every tab change stored for an hour, hourly snapshots stored for 24 hours, daily snapshots stored for 30 days, and weekly snapshots stored for 90 days.
Live-sync tabs across devices: In our new system, we will finally be able to deliver the live-syncing experience we’ve always dreamed of! If you open, change, group, or close a tab on another computer, you’ll instantly see that change reflected on all of your other computers. In our current system, when you access the same space on multiple computers at the same time, we show you a popup prompting you to manually merge the session from your other computers. This manual sync approach required unintuitive decisions at best, and led to sync conflicts at worst.
Native support for tab groups is coming to the Workona Tab Manager extension, so the Tab Groups Helper extension will no longer be required. Not only that, but tab groups data will be stored in the cloud with the space’s session, which means they will be restored far more reliably, as well as synced across devices!
Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers (e.g. Edge) have begun to roll out changes that prevent our web app from persisting your Workona login to our browser extension popups & new tab page.
These are good changes that prevent bad actors from accessing data on sites they shouldn't have access to. Unfortunately, this change also impacts browser extensions that require access to data on to their own company's domain (workona.com).
Without changing how we handle authentication, users would be required to log in to our browser extensions multiple times per day. Obviously, this would result in a poor user experience.
Luckily, Chrome has explicitly provided a solution for apps like Workona:
Because partitioning the storage will break some use cases, a couple of mitigations will be provided. If the extension has host_permissions for the iframe origin, then the iframe will be treated as the top-level frame and not the extension page.
In other words, as long as our extensions request access to your data on workona.com, then everything will continue to work the same way it always has.
If you have any additional questions about this change, please reach out to our support team and we'll be happy to help.
If you don’t grant the new required permissions prior to the date that we officially make them required, your browser will automatically disable the extension, and the Workona Tab Manager will no longer function.
That means that your spaces will no longer autosave your sessions, and all other browser-related features of Workona will be unavailable. If you reenable the extension, everything should begin working properly again.
As our CTO Alma Madsen has written about before, users should be rightfully cautious whenever a browser extension requests permissions — doubly so when an extension requests additional permissions. When your favorite new tab extension is suddenly requesting access to your bank’s website, odds are that something fishy is going on!
However, many extensions like Workona, Grammarly, 1Password, & Todoist are developed by reputable companies that are run by passionate teams who would sooner shut down their company before selling out their users.
We hope that our spotless record after six years in business should provide all the reassurance you need to know that you’re still in good hands, as well as these facts: