The "Hidden Tabs Keeps Appearing" Problem

 Summary: Hopefully this is fixed in 3.3.3, but see Note 2 at bottom if you still have problems!

I've been hearing scattered reports for quite some time about how the hidden tabs prompt keeps appearing; enough that I added a dedicated category for it to the exit survey so I could see if it was a major issue or not.

And the answer was a resounding "yes". I also started seeing the occasional review that discussed it, too.

Unfortunately as is often the case, I could not reproduce the issue, and I did not have a clear way to find out what was causing it. Fortunately I was able to respond to one of the reviewers and the worked with me to capture logs from their system. So if this fix works for you, please tell Umbrella123 over on the GitHub issue thanks! (See https://github.com/wingman-jr-addon/wingman_jr/issues/185)

So what was the problem and why did the "Hidden Tabs" prompt keep appearing?

First, it's important to keep in mind that originally the addon did not need these hidden tabs. But unfortunately some slight changes in how Firefox and the machine learning framework Tensorflow.js interacted caused the old approach to become unbearably slow one one Firefox release a couple years ago. This forced a massive rewrite. As part of the rewrite, I needed to basically separate the addon into two parts: the original core part, and a satellite "web page" that can access the graphics card more effectively. Having these separate parts has two important implications: 1) the "Hidden Tabs" prompt shows up to hide the satellite "web page" and 2) there is increased complexity to get the two parts to talk to each other.

Second, the increased complexity of the system drove me to rely on a "watchdog" - the addon will send itself a known test image every few seconds and check that the result is as expected and consistent. This makes sure data is flowing through the system OK. This is quite important because generally people expect the addon to work even after scanning tens of thousands of images, just like the browser does. I'd also seen sometimes in the past where Tensorflow.js eventually could become unstable so it helps guard against that. If the "watchdog" self-test fails, the addon will assume that something has gone wrong with itself and restart after a certain threshold.

You can probably see where this is going now: when you see the "Hidden Tabs" prompt, it is the addon restarting itself because it thinks it is malfunctioning.

For a while I assumed this was probably due to some bad interaction with another addon that also did filtering. But it turns out that the true cause of the problem is that Tensorflow.js on certain Linux systems seems to give inconsistent results from the first prediction to later predictions for the same test image - the values can be close, but still different. So the self-checker would bail after a few self-checks and the "Hidden Tabs" prompt would appear.

I would argue that this seems to be a bug in Tensoflow.js on Linux, but I decided to make the check more robust by doing an "approximately equal" check instead and now it is working. Hooray! Special thanks to Umbrella123 for helping finding the issue, Opensourcerer for confirming the fix, and all the users reporting they were having this problem. Please let me know on GitHub or in reviews if you are still seeing issues, but hopefully it's just gone now.

Note! Umbrella123 also pointed out that they needed to set two settings to work - in about:config, set webgl.out-of-process to true and webgl.force-enabled to true. Please try these if you are having issues.

Note 2! Codedotexe reported that they needed to increase the tolerance for their computer - I'll plan to widen it for the next release as per https://github.com/wingman-jr-addon/wingman_jr/issues/191