Firefox will not open old tabs
My computer crashed last evening and on restarting firefox, it goes to a new page without any of the old tabs available. Going under history has all of the options regarding restoring recently closed windows greyed out.
I did confirm that under preferences it is set to open previous tabs on starting firefox.
I have had the sessionstore.js file get corrupted previously. Looking in the profile folder showed the sessionstore.js to be a 1k file. So my first instinct was to just restore that file, and fortunately, there is a sessionstore.bak file with a time late last PM, so that file should still contain my last session.
I made a copy of the sessionstore.bak file and renamed it to sessionstore.js, but firefox still opens with a fresh session. I had the windows explorer (i.e. file manager) window open and as firefox was starting, the sessionstore.js got clobbered back to a 1k file suggesting the firefox is clearing the last session on opening. I tried restoring sessionstore.js from sessionstore.bak another time and making sessionstore.js read only, but firefox still will not revert back to the previous browsing session; instead it creates a new file called sessionstore.js.tmp.
I'm at a loss as to how to get my old browsing session back. I'm still using firefox V28.0. I haven't upgraded to V29 due to not wanting to lose the ability to export tabs as reported in the reviews of the android version of V29. Operating system is Win 7 SP1.
Chosen solution
The sessionstore.js file is a JSON object, and I think there are some developer tools for syntax checking and perhaps repair. However, past searches led me to pages that were a little over my head.
Absent a tool that understands JavaScript, my next stop would be Microsoft Word, simply because I do a lot of complex find/replace in Word and I'm pretty sure I could extract the URLs that way.
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If Firefox won't read the file when it's named sessionstore.js, it may have a structural problem. In that case, a little surgery might be needed, but it's hard to know what to suggest without more information.
Could try one of the data mining techniques in these posts to rescue the URLs from the sessionstore.js or sessionstore.bak file:
- Using Firefox's Browser Console (formerly known as Error Console): https://support.mozilla.org/questions/969046#answer-471950
- Using Firefox developer tool "Scratchpad": http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=622036&start=60&p=12098147#p12098147
- Using a third party website: https://firefox-session-restore.herokuapp.com/
Firefox Session Restore ?
Cool ! ! ! !
Modified by FredMcD
I think the sessionstore file is corrupted.
I tried the third party website first, and firefox crashed when I submitted the file.
Using the scratchpad method, I tried "run", and I get the response
/* Exception: missing ; before statement
- /
I'm assuming that to recovering the sessionstore file would be very time consuming -- going line by line to correct missing punctuation.
Fortunately, I was able to go back farther, and I found an older version of sessionstore under "previous versions." Reverting to this preserved all of the important tabs, and FF is back to working correctly.
The only question left is academic -- any other ways to have recovered the original file?
Did you check for History > Recently Closed Tabs/Windows?
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The sessionstore.js file is a JSON object, and I think there are some developer tools for syntax checking and perhaps repair. However, past searches led me to pages that were a little over my head.
Absent a tool that understands JavaScript, my next stop would be Microsoft Word, simply because I do a lot of complex find/replace in Word and I'm pretty sure I could extract the URLs that way.