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How to restore a previous session after firefox closed and cleared browsing history, is still any chance to get it back there?

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  • 11 have this problem
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  • Last reply by cor-el

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Accidentally shut down the pc and firefox did not come back with option restore previous session at the first screen even in History-Restory previous session is Grey. My settings are clean history after firefox is closed. Is there any change to get back on my Tabs from previous session even the history browsing was cleaned? I would appreciate your help!

Accidentally shut down the pc and firefox did not come back with option restore previous session at the first screen even in History-Restory previous session is Grey. My settings are clean history after firefox is closed. Is there any change to get back on my Tabs from previous session even the history browsing was cleaned? I would appreciate your help!

Chosen solution

In general FireFox will behave in 1 of 3 ways when restarted after a shutdown.

1. Kill Shutdown This happens when the FireFox process is terminated with a TerminateProcess() call or if the FireFox process crashes. It is a dirty exit, no clean-up is done. When restarted after this FireFox will show a "Well this is embarrassing" dialog with options to restore selected parts of the previous session.

2. Force Shutdown This happens when another process asks FireFox to shutdown cleanly (such as a PC restart) by a call to ExitProcessEx() and does not ask the user for confirmation. Normally, when this type of shutdown occurs, Firefox will just restore all tabs and sessions without asking. However if Firefox is set to automatically delete history on shutdown, it can't. I suspect this is your situation. I would suggest to the FF team that deleting history should be skipped in this case, only a user shutdown should delete history.

3. User shutdown. This is when the user tells Firefox to close down (by selecting Exit or closing all tabs etc..). Confirmation is asked to close all tabs (if enabled and more than 1 tab is open). On restart, nothing is restored.


Unfortunately, if you have auto clear history enabled, there's no way to recover the previous session. Sorry.

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Chosen Solution

In general FireFox will behave in 1 of 3 ways when restarted after a shutdown.

1. Kill Shutdown This happens when the FireFox process is terminated with a TerminateProcess() call or if the FireFox process crashes. It is a dirty exit, no clean-up is done. When restarted after this FireFox will show a "Well this is embarrassing" dialog with options to restore selected parts of the previous session.

2. Force Shutdown This happens when another process asks FireFox to shutdown cleanly (such as a PC restart) by a call to ExitProcessEx() and does not ask the user for confirmation. Normally, when this type of shutdown occurs, Firefox will just restore all tabs and sessions without asking. However if Firefox is set to automatically delete history on shutdown, it can't. I suspect this is your situation. I would suggest to the FF team that deleting history should be skipped in this case, only a user shutdown should delete history.

3. User shutdown. This is when the user tells Firefox to close down (by selecting Exit or closing all tabs etc..). Confirmation is asked to close all tabs (if enabled and more than 1 tab is open). On restart, nothing is restored.


Unfortunately, if you have auto clear history enabled, there's no way to recover the previous session. Sorry.

Modified by Boltar

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Thank you!

You are Right, FF is set to automatically delete history on shutdown. That`s why I lost all Tabs  :( Just now installed Session manager to prevent such a bad situation to deal with in the future and do not check delete browsing history in the settings when FF closed.

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Note that Firefox will try to remove those items on the next start when this didn't happen when closing Firefox.