Reviews for Workona Spaces & Tab Manager
Workona Spaces & Tab Manager by Workona
124 reviews
- Rated 5 out of 5by EHR, 4 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by 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.
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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. - Rated 1 out of 5by A FF User, 4 years agoWARNING! EXCESSIVE PERMISSIONS!!! ZERO PRIVACY!!! YOUR DATA IS NOT ENCRYPTED OR DE-IDENTIFIED!!! SUSCEPTIBLE TO PERSONAL DATA ABUSE!!! >>> GET "STATION" OR "FERDI" OR "BISCUIT" FOR WINDOWS INSTEAD <<<
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 14583481, 4 years agoI would prefer not opening up of all tabs when I click on a section but prefer it opening up in the workona tab because sometimes you just want to move tabs to another section and don't want to be blasted by all the saved tabs also the undo toast message at the bottom right can be replaced to some other part of the screen as it annoys from moving and organizing tabs.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 15783088, 4 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by anibalardid, 4 years agola mejor extension para manejar solapas y tenerlas bien organizadas
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 16133010, 4 years agoMy review is based solely on how misleading Workona is about the privacy of your data. Their "About this extension" section on the Firefox add-on page says "Your data belongs to you and we store it for the sole purpose of providing value to you." That might make some people feel good to read, but it's completely misleading -- they don't technically sell your data, but if you read their privacy policy, they do make money off of it with advertising and use it for advertisers. Their privacy policy also says they don't respect browser "Do No Track" options because there is "no common industry or legal standard for DNT" -- sounds like they're saying they don't follow it because they legally don't have to.
Really disappointed that they go out of their way to say they respect privacy on an outward facing description of their product. Shame on you. Privacy and "Your data belongs to you" means something different that what your company is about, so don't twist words into nice-sounding marketing phrases and misrepresent yourself to consumers.
Small details reveal a lot, and I think this is revealing. But either way, Workona, you should change or remove the misleading description on your "About" page.
And I'm hoping your reasoning for these choices in data "privacy" is not "Well, this is just how the industry is," as if it makes it okay to do things just because other people do them.Developer response
posted 4 years agoWe’re sorry to hear that our privacy policy language is giving you pause about using Workona. We can assure you that we have no advertising in our product and don’t have any plans to change that. We have reserved the right to show you promotions from potential future partners (for example, an integration we think you would find useful), but no data will ever be shared with those partners. And of course, if you delete your account, your data is removed from our servers. Your data belongs to you, and we stand by that promise. We only use your data to make the product work better for you. - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 16094895, 4 years agoI've struggled with having 100s of tabs opened and feeling so disorganized all the time. I've been using Workona for several weeks now and I've never had my tabs so organized! Not only that, it's helping me focus on different projects without being distracted by unrelated projects from open tabs. I am also pleasantly surprised at how helpful I've found the "resources" option where I can save frequently used tabs like bookmarks within the same place where I organize my tabs. Brilliant!
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 16067467, 4 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Aaron, 5 years agoOutstanding productivity extension. I use Workona for organizing in both personal and professional settings. Extremely useful product.
- Rated 5 out of 5by seppinna, 5 years agoTired of having a thousand tabs opened? Then this is for you.
- Rated 5 out of 5by kgandhi_vzm, 5 years ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Jo, 5 years agoStill has some rough edges in Firefox. The biggest annoyance is that the New Tab page doesn't work, just shows a frozen search input, and that there's no option to use the extension to manage workspaces without using it for the new tab page.
Edit: I've tried re-installing after the fix, but I'm still having the problem. The search box on the new tab page is not functional, and there is no option to use a different new tab page while using Workona. Disappointing.
Edit 2: New tab still not working, and now opening workspaces in new windows isn't working either. That's the main feature I use this app for, so it's pretty much useless until that gets fixed.Developer response
posted 5 years agoHi Jo - Our apologies! We've now fixed the issue with the new tab you're describing here. Only users with certain settings encountered the issue, so we missed it in testing. Thanks for letting us know! - Rated 5 out of 5by DILIP, 5 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by jashwant LONDON, 5 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by carakas, 5 years agoWhen this first came out there was an issue causing it to fail and not work at all here. I was rather disappointed. But the team behind this got in touch with me and fixed it super fast. I went from disappointed to impressed. Thank you for fixing it so fast
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 15047902, 5 years agoTruly excellent extension...makes it very easy to stay organized and work across multiple computers and never have to worry about losing tab sessions.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Louie, 5 years agoGreat add-on for work and play!! Reason why i could not switch to firefox was this extension. With everything basically moving to a web portal environment, helps keep things in organized. If i need to work on office 365 administrator or internal services, helps using the workspaces. Awesome!!
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 15646849, 5 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by CaptainCalliope, 5 years agoAs an old school user of Firefox's Panorama feature from years ago, this extension is the replacement I've been behind and it takes the tab management experience to a whole new level.
This extension has also replaced my use of bookmarks, which I didn't realize could be tied into my tab management workflows this way. Great secondary side effect.
It's the ultimate organization and productivity tool missing from all browsers and I'm ecstatic that it's on Firefox now!
And Im not exaggerating when I say this extension existing means I can switch to Firefox full time and uninstall all my other browsers. - Rated 5 out of 5by Ray Bodnar, 5 years agoWorkona is an absolute must-have for anyone who works in the browser. It's not just the best tab manager out there - it's an entire system that's thoughtfully designed to help you organize all your work into dedicated workspaces. It's been on Chrome for awhile, so I was thrilled to see it now available on Firefox!
- Rated 5 out of 5by Zando Ward, 5 years ago