- General
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Ideas
Please open the source
I know this isn't easy, but it shouldn't also be easy to see your child orphaned. It's been 2 years you don't publish any new public versions.
It seems now that GDrive had changed its URL or something, and viewing backups got broken. New changes will come that require fixes, and I fear some day TO will go inoperable.
That is summed to the years-old issue of the licensing tool, that only works on Chrome. You've been forcing us into Chrome for years. We wanna move to Vivaldi and Brave, but must remain on Chrome.
The sad fact is that browsers extensions isn't a profitable business. Few ppl buy extensions for browsers that are free. I'd pay a subscription, but even fewer would. And charging once for a lifetime license isn't sustainable.
A few months ago Sandboxie was made freeware, and its owner is promising to open its source. I had also bought its lifetime license and used its features for years, and now they are free for anybody, and we lost our support and will need to hope an open source community to rise and support it.
This is also sad and hard, but it's still better than have a software we love and use everyday, and which we bought, to die like that.
Don't let this happen. There's no other tabs manager nearly as good as yours. We bought it, we supported you. Many of us are willing to subscribe if that brings your hard work back. If you can't, or you think we're not numbered enough to bother, then just open the source so we can hope somebody else can take it.
See ClassicShell in example.
Customer support service by UserEcho
Well said! I know it's daunting, what with the potential for hackers to exploit it, but that's the beauty of open source: other developers who specialize in security can plug up the loopholes for you.
Not only that but, if you have to limit the number of people, you also can have your pick of all the great devs who use this forum! I'm sure one of us would be willing to contribute for free for a period of time, only wanting credit for their portfolio. If you're worried about internal leakages and clones, GitHub has your code copyrighted. If you're still worried, you can reveal only certain folders/portions of the code.
P.S. As a cheap workaround for license keys for non-Chrome browsers, I'd recommend that users be able to keep their license key locally on their computers.
Using Google to register license will be like Xbox Live for Windows, it won't work and nobody wants it. Everybody who wanna use Chromium is moving to other browsers.
Also, IDK if other browsers are able to connect to GDrive as it's done by TO. I think that, instead of using GDrive API, it should just have option to use a local path for its backup. Then we just point to GDrive/Dropbox/etc and will keep files synched.
I don't know how much continuing income registration provides, but another option might be a community-funded source code buyout: a 1-time payment to open-source the codebase.
The extra eyes & assurances from an open-source, wider-contributor approach might even enable additional higher-value uses (maybe even with subscription revenue) - such as merging quiesced or older tabs into a bookmarking or full-text indexing tool
Thinking about it, he had never assumed he was abandoning the software, years ago when the issue was alrdy in course he said he was still working on it, implying that there's some newer unpublished version.
Instead of financial, maybe there was something else, maybe some health issue, maybe he got a fixed job and didn't know if it was gonna last or if he'd turn back to TO. I remember a post he was mad because of a Firefox addon inspired on TO, that was abandoned and he saw somebody accusing him of forcing that, what he didn't. So it seems he does care about TO and some unknown issue stopped him from continuing the work.
We don't know, it's been almost 2 years he doesn't post here and some more months since last published version. Maybe he was sick and didn't wanna disclose, maybe he died and this forum and the domain were paid for some years upfront.
Seems like he's too late:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/gcas5g/it_took_some_time_but_tree_style_tab_for_chrome/
https://github.com/Suibs/Tree-Style-Tab-For-Chrome
I tried it 2 months ago and again a couple weeks ago. It's a nice addition, but just doesn't fit my use case. I'm gonna make a new thread describing how I've been trying to replace TO.
Edit: thread created: https://tabsoutliner.userecho.com/communities/1/topics/464-how-im-combining-extensions-to-replace-tabs-outliner