Following up on this thread again, because despite some related issues (namely the pinned tab variant of this) being reported as fixed in the last release, my tabs still get randomized every single time I restart the browser, like, barely any resemblance at all to how they were when I closed the browser.
I don't have any kind of special setup, with tab groups and what not. I have 3 pinned tabs (which I've never seen reordered, but I digress), and generally between 100-150 tabs open in one group.
Here's what I have observed:
- The tabs that are primarily "randomized" are those that are active when the browser is exited.
- Suspended tabs seem to preserve their relative order, but their absolute order is affected by the apparent randomization of the active tabs.
- I cannot reproduce in a new profile, at least not trivially. So this has something to do with long-lived profiles. Unfortunately, that makes it a lot harder to troubleshoot, but I think it explains why it has been so easy to dismiss as being resolved. The thing is, there isn't any obvious way to "repair" a profile once this starts happening, i.e. it keeps happening to me and I have no idea what to do short of rebuilding a profile from scratch and hoping that actually fixes it, and that I don't just end up hitting the issue again at some point. If I was the only one seeing this, I'd just do that anyway, but this seems to happen on a recurring basis, so I'm doubtful that's an actual fix.
So I think I just want to make sure that whoever is looking/will look into this, is aware that it might not be something you can trivially test for, at least not until some underlying cause is identified. I'm happy to run any tests/experiments/whatever you want, since it's easy for me to repro on my primary profile, but aside from that I guess there isn't much that can be done.