Reviews for Workona Spaces & Tab Manager
Workona Spaces & Tab Manager by Workona
Review by jDally987
Rated 5 out of 5
by jDally987, 4 years agoUPDATE 09/19/20: Ok I changed my mind. Workona good. I'm sorry
Just a couple days after I posted the below review, a member of Workona's support team personally emailed me and wanted to work through my issues, point by point. Typical customer support stuff but they do seem especially genuine about it, and I gotta say it was somewhat impressive that they reached out to me first. But most importantly:
"...our product team has created a way for you to download your account’s Workona data from the following URL:
https://workona.com/export/mydata/."
Holy crap!
And it works great, spits out a .json formatted file with all your workspaces, URLs and etc. Mine turned out to be 16MB (!) and from the language he used in the email, it sounded almost as if it was made...recently?... in fact it made me legitimately wonder whether they had seen my (several) tweets and emails asking for that feature, and coded it together expressly, for me.
Now of course, maybe they just saw this scathing review, or idk, maybe I didn't see a bunch of other people asking for an export-data feature as well. (Although, I can't find the link to the page through googling, so it's definitely brand-new...) Either way, doesn't matter - I was fully expecting to get blown off until kingdom come but instead they delivered, and I was a little bit blown away. Any other company would MAYBE take a year or more to deliver on such a request, that is if they would even be willing to give users that kind of control over their data, in such an easily accessible form, at all. (users' data being basically the #1 source of revenue for most modern tech companies, keep in mind). I HAVE to give them major kudos for this.
I'll leave the original text up because Workona definitely still has some growing pains, but I'll admit I may have written it in an unnecessarily angry state of mind, with an unnecessary amount of nitpicking. It's worth pointing out that the only reason I was so irate is because I now DEPEND on Workona as an essential component of my workflow, and couldn't handle the - honestly, quite few and by no means world-ending - bugs that might be there. Which obviously says something about the greatness of the extension.
I'd say try it out, and just report any bugs you find. 99% of the time, it works freakin great. If you hate it, there's literally no downside now with the export-your-data functionality, as you can just migrate to something else and take your workspaces with you, if need be.
The only true annoyance, if I'm being real, is the resource consumption (always the highest CPU-muncher in Firefox's Task Manager). If they can hammer that out a bit, this thing may - MAY - be a contender (next to Bitwarden) for one of the few extensions you install right away when setting up a fresh browser.
--------------------------
I've really about had it with workona. I've been using it for what feels like a very long time now; at least a year or 2, and the constant problems with it are enough to make me detest using it, despite how useful it once was and still is, if I can ignore how much hair it's making me lose.
Settings never save, for some reason. I've emailed support about it, and I can't reproduce it but sometimes I'll just open the browser and my settings have inexplicably changed to the defaults. This is ridiculously annoying because I hate the "hidden tabs" window, basically a waste-of-space dummy window that clogs up your computer's taskbar and minimizes itself upon opening it, because you're not supposed to use it directly. Problem is sometimes it gobbles up some of my active tabs, so to get them back, I have to fight with the stupid hidden window, trying to select all the tabs I need back and drag them to another "real" chrome window, all within about 2 seconds before it gets away by cheekily minimizing itself, along with my tabs. It's infuriating. But anyway that's the default and every time I reinstall workona on a new computer I have to make sure to change it or else deal with the BS later. Another default option is that when saving a workspace, it won't automatically save your open tabs (I think). So sometimes I'll save a window full of tabs thinking they're safe; open it up later, and nothing is there. Sure there's a history feature for each workspace which is nice but it's kind of out of the way and I don't trust it anyway to reliably track changes between all of my various computers.
Oh what else... pictures and fonts are broken in Firefox if you use the Strict privacy feature; Workona is still usable but it's ugly as heck and you have to remember where all the buttons+their respective functions are, because they turn into blocks of text-links rather than an identifiable button. Emailed support about this also and they basically suggested switching to the Standard security setting, which I did because I don't actually care that much, but for others that's a straight up unacceptable compromise to make for one poorly-coded extension.
And now the real meat of my issues. Once you get to a certain mass of saved workspaces, Workona becomes an absolute behemoth of computer resources. At least on Ubuntu Linux/Pop_OS, my laptop fans run at full speed guaranteed within 10 minutes of opening firefox, once workona has pulled down all my workspaces. And mind you I only mean that they're displayed in the workspaces list; I usually have only 1-3 open at a given time. And yet Workona is consistently the TOP memory/CPU hog BY FAR AND AWAY, verified by the Task Manager in firefox and KDE's KSysGuard, and it was this way even in Windows with regular Chrome as well. I'm not sure what the hell it's doing that requires such immense processing power, but it LITERALLY kills my battery dead in no time and that's just utterly insane. Some rogue javascript cancer add-on has no place in being my device(s') #1 power drain, period. BTW yes, I have thousands+ at least of tabs saved in probably hundreds of workspaces now (which I'm trying to get under control lol) but as a software engineer I know that shouldn't matter, and tells me their development suffers badly from scaling bottlenecks. Cmon guys it's pretty bad that that's an issue. Just because you have to store maybe a few kilobytes' worth of URLs, maximum, in the local db cache or whatever does not mean they should be eating up CPU resources as well at idle. To reiterate, this happens when I have literally 2 open workspaces (maybe 25-50 tabs at most) and yet FF's task manager identifies workona as the top offender and it's not even close.
Finally, the data ownership issue. I'm a proponent of personal privacy and owning your own data, nothing insane, but I prefer to be able to export stuff into a raw format and work with it myself, for transferring to another browser or service locally, without relying on a cloud/internet connection or a single company holding it all hostage. I've tweeted, emailed, etc Workona about this tons of times now and always get something like "it's coming soon!" but have seen absolutely nothing materialize. I need to be able to export a list (.txt, JSON, a CSV, I don't care, anything!) of all my stored/archived workspaces, resources, open tab URL's, history. Any or all. Just something, please - but there is no love so far.
And that is the final thing making me salty right now... I'm fed up with Workona and want to switch to something else, probably a cloud-synced bookmark service or something, but I have tons of important stuff locked in my workona account. I want to export it into a file locally so I can write a script or something to convert to bookmarks, easily importable into Firefox or Chrome or what have you. Opening each of my workspaces and bookmarking the tabs into folders + naming them identically by hand would take freaking forever, and this should theoretically take no time at all to implement by the devs; but for whatever reason they don't seem to view it as a priority. Well thanks, guys. I don't expect a single startup to respond to my every beck and call, but I do expect to be able to take some of my work I did with them and leave with it if I want to, but I really cannot do it easily right now. Shame. I didn't want to be mad at them, but they apparently don't care much, so maybe this overly verbose review will get them to think about it a little more.
Just a couple days after I posted the below review, a member of Workona's support team personally emailed me and wanted to work through my issues, point by point. Typical customer support stuff but they do seem especially genuine about it, and I gotta say it was somewhat impressive that they reached out to me first. But most importantly:
"...our product team has created a way for you to download your account’s Workona data from the following URL:
https://workona.com/export/mydata/."
Holy crap!
And it works great, spits out a .json formatted file with all your workspaces, URLs and etc. Mine turned out to be 16MB (!) and from the language he used in the email, it sounded almost as if it was made...recently?... in fact it made me legitimately wonder whether they had seen my (several) tweets and emails asking for that feature, and coded it together expressly, for me.
Now of course, maybe they just saw this scathing review, or idk, maybe I didn't see a bunch of other people asking for an export-data feature as well. (Although, I can't find the link to the page through googling, so it's definitely brand-new...) Either way, doesn't matter - I was fully expecting to get blown off until kingdom come but instead they delivered, and I was a little bit blown away. Any other company would MAYBE take a year or more to deliver on such a request, that is if they would even be willing to give users that kind of control over their data, in such an easily accessible form, at all. (users' data being basically the #1 source of revenue for most modern tech companies, keep in mind). I HAVE to give them major kudos for this.
I'll leave the original text up because Workona definitely still has some growing pains, but I'll admit I may have written it in an unnecessarily angry state of mind, with an unnecessary amount of nitpicking. It's worth pointing out that the only reason I was so irate is because I now DEPEND on Workona as an essential component of my workflow, and couldn't handle the - honestly, quite few and by no means world-ending - bugs that might be there. Which obviously says something about the greatness of the extension.
I'd say try it out, and just report any bugs you find. 99% of the time, it works freakin great. If you hate it, there's literally no downside now with the export-your-data functionality, as you can just migrate to something else and take your workspaces with you, if need be.
The only true annoyance, if I'm being real, is the resource consumption (always the highest CPU-muncher in Firefox's Task Manager). If they can hammer that out a bit, this thing may - MAY - be a contender (next to Bitwarden) for one of the few extensions you install right away when setting up a fresh browser.
--------------------------
I've really about had it with workona. I've been using it for what feels like a very long time now; at least a year or 2, and the constant problems with it are enough to make me detest using it, despite how useful it once was and still is, if I can ignore how much hair it's making me lose.
Settings never save, for some reason. I've emailed support about it, and I can't reproduce it but sometimes I'll just open the browser and my settings have inexplicably changed to the defaults. This is ridiculously annoying because I hate the "hidden tabs" window, basically a waste-of-space dummy window that clogs up your computer's taskbar and minimizes itself upon opening it, because you're not supposed to use it directly. Problem is sometimes it gobbles up some of my active tabs, so to get them back, I have to fight with the stupid hidden window, trying to select all the tabs I need back and drag them to another "real" chrome window, all within about 2 seconds before it gets away by cheekily minimizing itself, along with my tabs. It's infuriating. But anyway that's the default and every time I reinstall workona on a new computer I have to make sure to change it or else deal with the BS later. Another default option is that when saving a workspace, it won't automatically save your open tabs (I think). So sometimes I'll save a window full of tabs thinking they're safe; open it up later, and nothing is there. Sure there's a history feature for each workspace which is nice but it's kind of out of the way and I don't trust it anyway to reliably track changes between all of my various computers.
Oh what else... pictures and fonts are broken in Firefox if you use the Strict privacy feature; Workona is still usable but it's ugly as heck and you have to remember where all the buttons+their respective functions are, because they turn into blocks of text-links rather than an identifiable button. Emailed support about this also and they basically suggested switching to the Standard security setting, which I did because I don't actually care that much, but for others that's a straight up unacceptable compromise to make for one poorly-coded extension.
And now the real meat of my issues. Once you get to a certain mass of saved workspaces, Workona becomes an absolute behemoth of computer resources. At least on Ubuntu Linux/Pop_OS, my laptop fans run at full speed guaranteed within 10 minutes of opening firefox, once workona has pulled down all my workspaces. And mind you I only mean that they're displayed in the workspaces list; I usually have only 1-3 open at a given time. And yet Workona is consistently the TOP memory/CPU hog BY FAR AND AWAY, verified by the Task Manager in firefox and KDE's KSysGuard, and it was this way even in Windows with regular Chrome as well. I'm not sure what the hell it's doing that requires such immense processing power, but it LITERALLY kills my battery dead in no time and that's just utterly insane. Some rogue javascript cancer add-on has no place in being my device(s') #1 power drain, period. BTW yes, I have thousands+ at least of tabs saved in probably hundreds of workspaces now (which I'm trying to get under control lol) but as a software engineer I know that shouldn't matter, and tells me their development suffers badly from scaling bottlenecks. Cmon guys it's pretty bad that that's an issue. Just because you have to store maybe a few kilobytes' worth of URLs, maximum, in the local db cache or whatever does not mean they should be eating up CPU resources as well at idle. To reiterate, this happens when I have literally 2 open workspaces (maybe 25-50 tabs at most) and yet FF's task manager identifies workona as the top offender and it's not even close.
Finally, the data ownership issue. I'm a proponent of personal privacy and owning your own data, nothing insane, but I prefer to be able to export stuff into a raw format and work with it myself, for transferring to another browser or service locally, without relying on a cloud/internet connection or a single company holding it all hostage. I've tweeted, emailed, etc Workona about this tons of times now and always get something like "it's coming soon!" but have seen absolutely nothing materialize. I need to be able to export a list (.txt, JSON, a CSV, I don't care, anything!) of all my stored/archived workspaces, resources, open tab URL's, history. Any or all. Just something, please - but there is no love so far.
And that is the final thing making me salty right now... I'm fed up with Workona and want to switch to something else, probably a cloud-synced bookmark service or something, but I have tons of important stuff locked in my workona account. I want to export it into a file locally so I can write a script or something to convert to bookmarks, easily importable into Firefox or Chrome or what have you. Opening each of my workspaces and bookmarking the tabs into folders + naming them identically by hand would take freaking forever, and this should theoretically take no time at all to implement by the devs; but for whatever reason they don't seem to view it as a priority. Well thanks, guys. I don't expect a single startup to respond to my every beck and call, but I do expect to be able to take some of my work I did with them and leave with it if I want to, but I really cannot do it easily right now. Shame. I didn't want to be mad at them, but they apparently don't care much, so maybe this overly verbose review will get them to think about it a little more.