Permanent pinned tabs independent of session restore

Brave Feature Requests Desktop Requests
1

Brave’s current pinned tabs are effectively part of the browser session/window state. This causes problems when:

  • Brave is closed unexpectedly or the operating system shuts down while the browser is still running,

  • multiple Brave windows are open and one window becomes the last restored session,

  • a pinned tab is moved into another window,

  • session restore does not reproduce the previous workspace exactly.

This is not specific to one operating system. The same underlying problem can occur on Windows, Linux, and potentially other desktop platforms.

I think Brave should distinguish between two types of pinning:

Pin
Current behavior — the tab belongs to the current window/session.

Pin permanently
The tab becomes part of the user’s persistent browser workspace and should always be restored when Brave starts.

The context menu could simply contain:

  • Pin

  • Pin permanently

For an already pinned tab, only:

  • Unpin

The user should not need to know how the tab was pinned. “Unpin” should remove either type appropriately.

Implementation idea

Permanent pinned tabs should not depend on session restore at all.

Brave could keep a very small user-level persistent configuration, separate from normal session/window data — for example JSON or another simple persistent store containing:

  • URL

  • pinned state

  • order

  • optionally other future metadata

Conceptually:

{
  "permanent_tabs": [
    {
      "url": "https://example.com/",
      "order": 0
    }
  ]
}

On startup Brave would:

  1. restore the normal session if available,

  2. load the permanent-tab configuration,

  3. check which permanent tabs already exist,

  4. open any that are missing,

  5. pin them.

This configuration should belong to the user/browser installation rather than to an individual window session.

This gives two clearly different concepts:

Session state: what I happened to have open when Brave closed.

Permanent workspace: tabs that I explicitly said should always be there.

Bookmarks do not solve the same problem. A bookmark is something the user can find and open later. A permanently pinned tab is part of the user’s browser workspace and should already be there.

In other words: session data behaves like RAM; permanent pinned tabs behave like ROM.

The important part from the user’s perspective is that configuration requires no settings page. Right-click a tab → Pin permanently. That’s all.