iOS 15.5 just deleted all of my Safari tabs

[asaytoonas]

iOS 15.1 here... Yesterday it just erased half my tabs too. I was running out of memory, I knew I had to close the useless tabs and save the useful ones very soon. Being at the limit of memory, I needed to copy some text and use it on Safari. The phone just decided to close over 150 tabs. All my history over 7 months.
I guess there's no way they will be back, right? Safari history keeps only until 15 days ago.
I wish it was a bug and they just come back after rebooting the phone... Doesn't look like that.

Edit... I just found out that all the private tabs have been erased too.

Yes, it has been working fine until iOS 12. So sad that this bug happens now from time to time. If there's not enough memory, just say "you can't use Safari until you free some memory", just like the mail or WhatsApp.

 

[asaytoonas]

I do it out of convenience and it worked for the last 10 years. Technically there is no difference between a list of tabs and a list of bookmarks. Neither should be lost.

Shouldn't be lost, but it looks like that it requires a lot of memory from the device. Every time you browse your tabs, websites and tab history are reloaded. I guess it's more than keeping a bunch of bites in a character string (bookmark).
I understand you, but that uses quite much memory and RAM from the device. So that's why I try to clean it from time to time... This time Safari "cleaned" it before me. It's not the first time it happens to me, but this time has been stronger.

 

[asaytoonas]

I've never understood why people do this. If it's that important, just bookmark it and come back later.
If it crashes and has to restart, you're probably going to lose everything you had open anyway.

Leaving tabs open is like tempting fate to screw you.

It's just easier. If you are in constant hurry... You need to take your time to order your tabs and keep them. That's my case.
Would you keep just 300 bookmarks without having classified them? It takes time.


Maybe this helps to someone. You can copy all the links and paste it in some text note. Could work as an emergency backup. I didn't do it, I see it would have helped me.

 

[Slartibart]

It's just easier. If you are in constant hurry... You need to take your time to order your tabs and keep them. That's my case.
Would you keep just 300 bookmarks without having classified them? It takes time.

Well, to be fair if you already ordered your open tabs it’s simple to save a tab group. Same goes for unsorted (and - besides having some bookmark folders for specific things - there is quite a lot of links I just save under ”bookmarks” 🤓🤪, YMMV.)

But I understand that having many web pages open in you browser can offer convenience - and then again I see it a little bit like thinking that this trick, where the table cloth is removed under the table ware & cutlery of a fully dressed dinner table, always works.
Of course it can be performed perfectly, but personally I am not surprised that sometimes things get moved a little bit… or that it goes wrong. 😀 And you wouldn’t blame the maker of the table cloth and table, wouldn’t you? 🙃

 

[Piripoeri]

It is actually easy to reproduce for me. Go to a tabgroup other than the default. Close safari. The tabs in the default tabgroup are gone.

The last visited website from the default group is being displayed over the site that you were looking at in the “other” tabgroup. The menu still says “15” tabs for the default tabgroup but if you select it it’s empty.

You can still force press and copy all links of the tabgroup (even though the tabs are not visible anymore ).

Unbelievable that Apple still hasn’t come up with a fix, this being so easy to reproduce and so obvious.

 

[Slartibart]

It is actually easy to reproduce for me. Go to a tabgroup other than the default. Close safari. The tabs in the default tabgroup are gone.

I just opened a few random websites in tabs and saved them as a tab group named „test“. Closed and quit Safari. Restarted it - tab group is there with all tabs. What do you mean by „ default“ tab group?

 

[Piripoeri]

I just opened a few random websites in tabs and saved them as a tab group named „test“. Closed and quit Safari. Restarted it - tab group is there with all tabs. What do you mean by „ default“ tab group?

With the default one I mean the one that you cannot delete. It has an device icon instead of tabs, it’s above the private tab group.

The tabgroups you create yourself don’t have any issue.

Regards

 

[cynics]

Here I am trying to minimize the amount of tabs I have open as 3 active are holding 50mb of RAM each according to instruments.

 

[Slartibart]

With the default one I mean the one that you cannot delete. It has an device icon instead of tabs, it’s above the private tab group.

I see these as the actual tabs loaded… into RAM… volatile… well, they are actually reloaded on my iPP when I restart Safari… would not be surprised, if they are gone after restart so….

The tabgroups you create yourself don’t have any issue.

Yo mean: the tab-groups one SAVES have no issue.

I get the convenience of having the state of an app saved and restored - including all open tabs.
But then again, how to implement a „clean slate“-startup for Safari without having it load several website into tabs when newly started?
Offering save-stated tab-groups which are loaded on demand and otherwise starting with the last visited website seems to me like a solution into which went some careful thinking. YMMV

 

[Mr.Börns]

That’s not a bug, it’s a feature 😂 As we know we all surf too much and sometimes someone has to press the reset button for us, even if you don't want to do it yourself, maybe. I only have Apple products and haven't used anything else for 20 years, but some bugs can get on your nerves, especially if it's happened twice because you thought it was a one-time error. Now I’ll create bookmarks, always. Unfortunately this is annoying when there were valuable web development article tabs that could still be used 🥺 up to 500 of them, once, now there were only 111 tabs gone from me 😂🤷🏻‍♂️ I think I'll reactivate the reading list again, although unfortunately it reset itself a few years ago, because finding the closed tabs between the cloesd tabs is next to impossible…

now that they're gone it's hard to change the state anyway, so we're taking this as a way to slow things down, knowing that memory isn't limitless 🙏🏻☺️

And it only hurts the first time, the second or third time it gets better, If that's any consolation to you 😂

 

[Gnr1x]

If anyone want to know why we left so many pages open. It was so convenient to have 350 pages open, they were not important to save as bookmarks and they were important in a way that I would like to read it in the future(could be even 10 years later). Once happened on ios14 on my ipad pro and second one was 15 mins ago. I have saved some of the tabs with the tab groups but I have lost 350+. Some were important as hell but you know apple. So f you apple.

 

[asaytoonas]

Well, to be fair if you already ordered your open tabs it’s simple to save a tab group. Same goes for unsorted (and - besides having some bookmark folders for specific things - there is quite a lot of links I just save under ”bookmarks” 🤓🤪, YMMV.)

But I understand that having many web pages open in you browser can offer convenience - and then again I see it a little bit like thinking that this trick, where the table cloth is removed under the table ware & cutlery of a fully dressed dinner table, always works.
Of course it can be performed perfectly, but personally I am not surprised that sometimes things get moved a little bit… or that it goes wrong. 😀 And you wouldn’t blame the maker of the table cloth and table, wouldn’t you? 🙃

No, they weren't ordered... Just chronological. If I had took time to order them, I would have saved the important ones too.

It's just a "to-do" thing.

 

[asaytoonas]

If anyone want to know why we left so many pages open. It was so convenient to have 350 pages open, they were not important to save as bookmarks and they were important in a way that I would like to read it in the future(could be even 10 years later). Once happened on ios14 on my ipad pro and second one was 15 mins ago. I have saved some of the tabs with the tab groups but I have lost 350+. Some were important as hell but you know apple. So f you apple.

Maybe you would like to use the Reading List.

 

[asaytoonas]

That’s not a bug, it’s a feature 😂 As we know we all surf too much and sometimes someone has to press the reset button for us, even if you don't want to do it yourself, maybe. I only have Apple products and haven't used anything else for 20 years, but some bugs can get on your nerves, especially if it's happened twice because you thought it was a one-time error. Now I’ll create bookmarks, always. Unfortunately this is annoying when there were valuable web development article tabs that could still be used 🥺 up to 500 of them, once, now there were only 111 tabs gone from me 😂🤷🏻‍♂️ I think I'll reactivate the reading list again, although unfortunately it reset itself a few years ago, because finding the closed tabs between the cloesd tabs is next to impossible…

now that they're gone it's hard to change the state anyway, so we're taking this as a way to slow things down, knowing that memory isn't limitless 🙏🏻☺️

And it only hurts the first time, the second or third time it gets better, If that's any consolation to you 😂

Not a feature. When your iPhone memory is full and it needs to free space for RAM and it erases 200 opened tabs when it wants - that's not a feature. Call it crash.

And that's an unneeded crash. It could just not allow you to use Safari, just as mail.
There's a reason why there is a 500 limit. The phone is supposed to handle it.

 

[silllli]

Funny thing: I just had to restore my phone from an iCloud backup and it brought back 115 tabs that were once lost (several weeks or even months ago). It replaced the recent opened tabs, so now these are gone—you can‘t have everything I guess.

 

[silllli]

The last visited website from the default group is being displayed over the site that you were looking at in the “other” tabgroup. The menu still says “15” tabs for the default tabgroup but if you select it it’s empty.

You can still force press and copy all links of the tabgroup (even though the tabs are not visible anymore ).

Copying the links also works for me, thank you for the tip! It‘s gold.

 

[dcasali]

I have unfortunately confirmed what Piripoeri stated earlier (sorry, haven’t figured out quotes on this forum yet). This is an easily reproducible bug. I lost over 200 tabs in my default set and was unaware of the link copy save. This seems to have come in with IOS 15.5 (although it may have existed prior; I just started adding tab groups recently.) As stated, if you are in a tab group you’ve created, and quit Safari, your default tabs are history, even though they may appear to show in the sidebar as a count. Not the least bit amusing. I am not interested in being castrigated for asking the poor program to reliably perform exactly what it clearly was designed to do, and had done for years. Any bug that loses user data is a serious bug in my book. It smarts. At least I now know how to avoid it, and how to mitigate an occurrence. Thank you to all.

 

[dasthunder]

So as expected this was a huge bug! What was from IOS 15.5 is no longer happening in IOS 16 release. The new Tabs was being cleared every day that I opened the main group… And by now in IOS 16 that doesn’t happen… hopefully it was somehow detected and repaired!

 

[wallah]

I have unfortunately confirmed what Piripoeri stated earlier (sorry, haven’t figured out quotes on this forum yet). This is an easily reproducible bug. I lost over 200 tabs in my default set and was unaware of the link copy save. This seems to have come in with IOS 15.5 (although it may have existed prior; I just started adding tab groups recently.) As stated, if you are in a tab group you’ve created, and quit Safari, your default tabs are history, even though they may appear to show in the sidebar as a count. Not the least bit amusing. I am not interested in being castrigated for asking the poor program to reliably perform exactly what it clearly was designed to do, and had done for years. Any bug that loses user data is a serious bug in my book. It smarts. At least I now know how to avoid it, and how to mitigate an occurrence. Thank you to all.

YMMV but I have sometimes had success with another way to bring back Safari windows with many tabs that have just vanished:

Long press Safari in dock > select Show All Windows > on the top right of screen next to the '+' icon, you will sometimes see the option 'Reopen Closed Window'.

This relieved my shock and disappointment of thinking I lost some treasured tabs a couple of times!