Hello,

Try Firefox Safe Mode to see if the problem goes away. Firefox Safe Mode is a troubleshooting mode that turns off some settings, disables most add-ons (extensions and themes).

If Firefox is open, you can restart in Firefox Safe Mode from the Help menu:

• In Firefox 29.0 and above, click the menu button , click Help and select Restart with Add-ons Disabled.
• In previous Firefox versions, click on the Firefox button at the top left of the Firefox window and click on Help (or click on Help in the Menu bar, if you don't have a Firefox button) then click on Restart with Add-ons Disabled.

If Firefox is not running, you can start Firefox in Safe Mode as follows:

• On Windows: Hold the Shift key when you open the Firefox desktop or Start menu shortcut.
• On Mac: Hold the option key while starting Firefox.
• On Linux: Quit Firefox, go to your Terminal and run firefox -safe-mode
  (you may need to specify the Firefox installation path e.g. /usr/lib/firefox)

When the Firefox Safe Mode window appears, select "Start in Safe Mode".

If the issue is not present in Firefox Safe Mode, your problem is probably caused by an extension, and you need to figure out which one. Please follow the Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems article to find the cause.

To exit Firefox Safe Mode, just close Firefox and wait a few seconds before opening Firefox for normal use again.

When you figure out what's causing your issues, please let us know. It might help others with the same problem.

Sorry, I tried every suggestion given there, and nothing worked. All the tabs still come up as blank New Tabs. Any other suggestions? It seems similar to others who had similar issues after a specific recent update, but I can't be sure that was where my issues began, though it seems very much along the same time frame.

Certain Firefox problems can be solved by performing a Clean reinstall. This means you remove Firefox program files and then reinstall Firefox. Please follow these steps:

Note: You might want to print these steps or view them in another browser.

1. Download the latest Desktop version of Firefox from http://www.mozilla.org and save the setup file to your computer.
2. After the download finishes, close all Firefox windows (click Exit from the Firefox or File menu).
3. Delete the Firefox installation folder, which is located in one of these locations, by default:
   • Windows:
     • C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
     • C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox
   • Mac: Delete Firefox from the Applications folder.
   • Linux: If you installed Firefox with the distro-based package manager, you should use the same way to uninstall it - see Install Firefox on Linux. If you downloaded and installed the binary package from the Firefox download page, simply remove the folder firefox in your home directory.
4. Now, go ahead and reinstall Firefox:
   1. Double-click the downloaded installation file and go through the steps of the installation wizard.
   2. Once the wizard is finished, choose to directly open Firefox after clicking the Finish button.

More information about reinstalling Firefox can be found here.

WARNING:Do not use a third party uninstaller as part of this process. Doing so could permanently delete your Firefox profile data, including but not limited to, extensions, cache, cookies, bookmarks, personal settings and saved passwords. These cannot be easily recovered unless they have been backed up to an external device! See Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles.

Please report back to say if this helped you!

Thank you.

Sorry, that was not helpful at all either. I went through the process of deleting Firefox and then re-installing but all the tabs still come up as blank New Tabs. Is there any way to install an older backup history of my browser or something? All the tabs are there, so there is some miscommunication between the browser and the actual information it's supposed to have stored.

Any other suggestions?

Do you have the PDF Viewer (pdfjs) extension installed?

I've noticed this issue after it updated to 1.0.8xx versions (1.0.770 works).

You may be out of luck once a new sessionstore.js has been created with empty tabs. You can try to rename the sessionstore.bak-xxx file with a time stamp appended that Firefox automatically creates when updating.

I had a folder on Desktop named 'Old Firefox Data' that just sort of appeared out of nowhere and it had a .bak file that dated back to early September. I replaced the current sessionstore file with that, and it only brought back several other windows full of tabs of the same nature that I had gotten rid of out of frustration with this whole situation. All the tabs still appear as New Tabs though. Should I just give up, close everything and accept defeat at this point? I mean it's been over a month now. I only had one gimmer of hope when one random crash restart brought everything back, but it never happened again. I just figured there had to be a way.

Also no, I did not have the pdf viewer extension.

Did you try to disable all extensions to see if that makes the sessionstore.js file(s) work?

Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problem.

See "Creating a profile":

• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Standard_diagnostic_-_Firefox#Profile_issues

If the new profile works then you can transfer files from a previously used profile to the new profile, but be cautious not to copy corrupted files to avoid carrying over problems.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Firefox

Does your most relevant profile folder have any other sessionstore files that seem gigantic enough to contain the missing tabs? In past threads, users sometimes were able to extract the URLs even though for one reason or another (unknown) Firefox wasn't able to read the file normally.

I would like to know more about how to possibly atleast retrieve the URLs that were specifically in all these blank tabs. It would be quite the process going through every single one, but it'd be better than just straight up losing everything. As for the 'creating a new profile' suggestion, the steps explained in the link are far too complex, or atleast worded in a way that makes it seem too complicated for me, personally, to really understand. Such cases are the reason a live chat support service would be ideal. Seems a tech would've been able to access my account and fix the issue with no sweat almost as soon as the problem began occuring.

Also, I did disable all extensions I had several times, to no avail. Hundreds of blank tabs yet.

Hi AnthoTira7, regarding salvaging URLs:

Assuming the file is not corrupted:

One of these should work:

(1) Using Firefox's "Scratchpad" web developer tool

(A) Original script: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=622036&start=60&p=12098147#p12098147

(B) Variation: http://dev.jeffersonscher.com/sessionstore_reader.html

(2) Online tool (third party website): https://firefox-session-restore.herokuapp.com/

If those give errors because the file structure is damaged:

You can scrounge the URLs out of the file using Microsoft Word and a VBA macro. I tested on a small file (250K) in Word 2010. Not sure whether it can handle extremely large files. You may want to turn off all proofing in Word before opening sessionstore.js since spellchecking and grammar-checking often crap out on large documents.

http://pastebin.com/iK6x2i1N

If you are not familiar with Word macros (or don't have Office) then this wouldn't be that convenient for you...

Yeah, seems like that was my best bet, but all the tabs still read as about:blank and I'm not sure I have any sessionstore.bak files that go back far enough to retrieve the info from before the crash,update, or whatever it was that corrupted the tabs, aside from one or two tabs that actually did get restored. Kind of sad. I mean, if my sessionstores might be backed up or archived somewhere other than wherever I have looked thus far, those methods seem like they would definitely work but it seems it's just been too long a time of me trying to salvage it that all the sessionstore files I have are a bit too updated.

I actually don't have Word. I did once and I know the difference of opening a file there and what it looks like compared to the formatting of opening with WordPad or something of that nature. Is there anyone I can deal with directly? Someone knowledgeable who might actually be able to look at the file(s) and help me address this issue, as opposed to people giving me different tech advice that, although nothing has worked for me, could very well not be working because I'm not 100% knowledgeable of what I am doing here? I feel like my problem would have way faster of a solution or atleast a straight-up "yes or no it can/can't be fixed" answer if someone more experience than I with these types of issues could 'grab the wheel' here, so to speak.

You should be able to open the file in a Firefox tab and possibly use View Page source or prefix the link with the view-source: prefix.

There are JavaScript bookmarklets in the mozillaZine forum thread that you can try.

• http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=622036

javascript:(function(){var D=document,H,i=j=0,P=D.getElementsByTagName('pre'),t=[],R=/[^:]\{"entries":\[\{("url":"([^"]*)")\,("title":"([^"]*)"){0,1}/g,T,U;for(j=0;E=P[j];j++){H=E.innerHTML;while(R.exec(H)){U=RegExp.$2;T=RegExp.$4;if(T.length==0){T=U;}t.push('<b>['+(++i)+']</b> <a href='+U+'>'+T+' ('+U+')<\/a>');}}with(window.open().document){write(t.join('<br>\n'));close()}})();

Again, I need that broken down to simpler terms. I don't know quite what to do what any of the information you or the link gives but thank you for not giving up on this.

Hi AnthoTira7, did you try https://firefox-session-restore.herokuapp.com/ ?

Yes, I did. It just keeps saying there was an error, but to refresh the page and try again. It says that over and over every time I tried it.

Hi AnthoTira7, I'm afraid that probably means the data in the file is corrupted, or there is more than the script can handle. If you want to send me the file to try the Word macro, you can use my username @gmail.com. Please edit the file extension to .txt before attaching so it isn't blocked.