Tab bar becomes corrupted – tabs cannot be selected or closed and new tabs open in separate windows

Orange-Natu

I repeatedly experience a serious tab management/UI bug in Orion on macOS.
After using Orion for some time, the tab bar suddenly enters a broken state. There is no obvious action that consistently triggers it.
When the issue occurs:
Existing tabs can no longer be reliably selected.
Tabs cannot always be closed normally.
New tabs are sometimes not displayed as normal tabs and instead appear as grey/blank areas in the tab bar.
Clicking the + button or attempting to open a new tab can unexpectedly create/open the tab in a different Orion window instead of the current window.
The number of tabs shown in the tab bar can apparently become inconsistent with the actual open tabs.
Once this happens, normal tab management becomes partially unusable.
The problem has occurred repeatedly, not just once. I have attached screenshots showing the broken tab state.
I have not yet found reliable steps to reproduce it from a clean Orion profile.

Tabs should remain selectable and closable at all times. Clicking the + button should create a normal new tab in the current window, and the tab bar should always accurately represent the tabs that are currently open.

Orion 1.1.2 (151), WebKit 625.1.8 — macOS 26.6.2 (Build 25G83), MacBook Air

Tahoe (26)

CielRuby

I have this issue as well, some tabs I cannot close then, it closes other tabs instead, and leaves a black area.
But this does not happen at the beginning for me.
Too add, when I drag out a tab, another (previous) tab gets dragged out, and the other gets removed.

sootkobold

I've had this happen with vertical tabs too. I can open and close tabs with shortcuts, but the UI is not tracking it and seems to be stuck and unusable.

etrigan63

This happens to me consistantly with Reddit. The tab bar is unresponsive on that tab and it has to be closed with a shortcut key.

akshatpatel

Hey everyone, we would really appreciate if you could provide some more info regarding this issue.

We understand that sometimes it seems like the issue pops up randomly, but some hints about your setup / what you were doing when this happened, etc. would really help narrow down the root cause of this and let us fix it.

Some things that would help:

Is Orion's sync (i.e. Settings > Sync > Enable cross-device sync...) turned on?
We see from the screenshot that you have uBlockOrigin extension - do you have any other extensions?
Any thing that stood out which causes this bug to happen? i.e. dragging a tab / opening a link / closing another tab? We are more interested in what caused this bug to happen - rather than what happens after the tab state is already corrupted.
What is the frequency of it? Do you get this every time while you're browsing, or is it say once a week, or more or less frequent?
Is only one window affected, or does the corruption pass to all windows (and new ones too)?
How do you get out of this state?

Please feel free to answer as many / little as you want to, but answers to these questions will really help us narrow down the cause of this issue.

akshatpatel

Actually a couple more questions which would be super helpful:

Do you use any extension which moves / creates / deletes tabs?
Did you have any extension settings page tab open when this happened, or did you open any extension settings page in the last launch of Orion?

etrigan63

In order:
NO
Ublock Origin and Cookie Guardian (reddit is exempted in the latter)
Doomscrolling for a time and then I am unable to close the tab by clicking on the X
Every time
Just the Reddit tab in my case
CMD+W to close the tab. Then the browser starts behaving again.
NO
NO

akshatpatel

@etrigan63 Since you are able to reproduce this consistently with the Reddit thread, please can you tell us:

What tab style are you using (compact / standard / vertical)
Are you able to select other tabs and select Reddit tab again? (i.e. is selection also broken or just closing with x)
Can you try disabling uBlockOrigin and Cookie Guardian (one by one and then both) and see if you are able to reproduce the bug when those are disabled? (This will help us narrow down if it is due to an interaction with one of these extensions)

etrigan63

Compact
No, the reddit tab is frozen. Reddit works but the tab is stuck. If I leave the tab, I cannot go back.
I wil try it and report back.

etrigan63

I enabled Compatibility Mode and the same thing happened almost immediately.