Pretty sucky. Why should I use Mozilla vs any other browser to run my small business? Don't have this issue with any other browsers.

So underwhelmed.

Seriously. You guys force an "update" and I lose all my history and active tabs? Paint me unimpressed.

I'll be using chrome going forward. Don't have that issue with them. And Ive been a HUGE Firefox supporter for a long time, but you can't F-up the user experience and expect to keep people.

Best of luck going forward, but I'll be rebuilding my tabs without your help. Shall I send you an invoice for my time?

That's insane. I'm truly sorry to hear that happened. Don't give up hope just yet! There should be a recovery file for your tabs in a folder called sessionstore-backups. If you can have a look in this thread, Jscher2000 goes into great detail about how to recover your previous tab session: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1364444

Also once you find that sessionstore-backups folder, immediately copy the entire folder to another location so the files there can't be overwritten by Firefox. The more times you open Firefox after losing the tabs, the higher chance Firefox will overwrite those backup files because there's only a few of them. There needs to be more in my opinion & I will try to file a bug about increasing the backups to a higher number.

The file you're looking for is probably: upgrade.jsonlz4-build_id: Which should have the windows and tabs in the Firefox session that was live at the time of your last update

My advice going forward would be to always manually backup your sessionstore backup files from that folder once a week or once a month to another safe location. Like My Documents or a backup folder of your choosing. Just to be on the safe side if you really like your tabs that much. I have seen massive tab loss in Chrome as well. So its not just a Firefox problem. But it definitely happens more than I would like & I do remember a history of this happening during Firefox upgrades many years ago but thought the problem had finally been resolved. *Sigh*

Please let me know how the tab recovery goes, very interested if you can successfully get them back. If not, it makes me want to raise hell about this since I've had a beef with the tab loss in Firefox for a long time & I've wanted a multi-day backup approach where you can choose from at least 5 days (or maybe more) worth of tab backup files. Just in case one of them turns out to be corrupted to give you a better chance to get as close as possible to your original tab session. Because tab loss is inevitable but making sure Firefox makes proper backups of the tabs & in a large enough quantity is key to not making a user feel like they've lost everything.

The only problem with my idea is for users with a super large amount of tabs & windows. The sessionstore backup files may be insanely huge. So let me know the size of your session backup files if you wouldn't mind. I don't think its gonna be as big as 1 GB but you never know. The files I'm interested in:

• recovery.jsonlz4: The windows and tabs in your currently live Firefox session (or, if Firefox crashed at the last shutdown and is still closed, your last session)
• recovery.baklz4: A backup copy of recovery.jsonlz4
• previous.jsonlz4: The windows and tabs in your last Firefox session
• upgrade.jsonlz4-build_id: The windows and tabs in the Firefox session that was live at the time of your last update

Oh, BTW, here are the recovery files I have

Of course I cant just paste a screen shot. You guys are killing me.

Where did my other reply go? I typed up a response and it's gone

You have no idea the level of frustration trying to recover my ecommerce business tabs that you blew away with an "upgrade". Costing me thousands of $$ while I try to rebuild my business tabs.

Thanks saviellope for the screenshot! I see the dates on those backup files are prior to the upgrade so you look in good shape & should be able to recover the missing tabs. Going to ask Jscher2000 to help me out on this to explain the recovery process as best as possible.

Just make sure to back up those files (copy & paste them to a different location) to be extra safe that nothing happens to them.

No worries saviellope I saw your post with your screenshot. It was just a delay in your post showing up here. Also please let me know if you backed up that folder of your tab backup files. With that done, it should be as simple as renaming one of the backup files to a new name while Firefox is closed & then restarting Firefox. That should get you back in business with all your tabs. But making a backup of those files is critical in case we run into a unforeseen problem & need to use another method to recover your tabs.

Thanks for hanging in there. Dataloss is not fun at all. But you can take this horrible experience, learn from it & use it to protect yourself in the future. All browsers can be hit by the dataloss bug. Don't let your guard down around the aura that they all work flawlessly. They all have this weakness. I had to train myself to make backups of data that I consider important on a weekly basis. It's annoying but if I really think its important to me, then it must be done.

To generate a list of the tabs in any of those files -- I suggest trying the largest one -- you can use this tool on my website:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/scrounger.html

Drop the file on the box and after it populates with the decompressed file contents, click the Scrounge URLs button. This should generate a list of all the tabs in the file within 15 seconds. If it's taking long, the tab probably crashed and you should close it and try again in a new tab.

If you get a useful list, use the Save List button to download it as a web page you can use for opening individual pages when needed.

It's also often possible to force feed the older file to Firefox to use for your next startup, in place of what you are using now. If you haven't given up on Firefox, we can describe the steps.

Your customer response communication pretty much sucks. I reply via Gmail, and get an error. What's the deal? You don't want to hear from customers?

Here's my response to your message that I should have bookmarked the 165 tabs I lost when I "upgraded" Firefox...

OK. Just so I have this straight. Your upgrade blew away my open tabs and it's my fault for not bookmarking them. OK. Seems fair. Put the burden on your customers to suffer the impacts of your "upgrade." No gracias. I'll switch to a different browser. Thanks for your "help."

Seriously underwhelmed by your "upgrade" and your support of long time customers who took it on the chin and lost data due to your "upgrade." Why should me and my business suffer from your "upgrade?" Makes no sense to me. I'll find another browser, thank you very much.

Thank you for your feedback.

Your customer response communication pretty much sucks. I reply via Gmail, and get an error. What's the deal? You don't want to hear from customers?

This is a community support forum. The email you got was to inform you of replies to this thread on this forum.

The closest you could do support by email was when Mozilla used to have newsgroups. archive of news.mozilla.org is at https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.support.firefox

Hi saviellope, normally tabs are not lost during an update. Firefox is designed to preserve them during updates, and nearly always does it flawlessly. Something went wrong during your update for some reason.

At this point, you can look at the session snapshot saved during the update to see whether it has those tabs. Please refer to my previous reply for a tool to extract the contents of the file. Whether you keep using Firefox or use a different browser, that would provide an excellent starting point to get back to where you were.

@jscher2000

Thanks for your help, but the procedure you outlined didn't work for me. Dropped the upgrade.jsonlz4-20220915150737 file to the box as instructed and nothing came of it.

I'll just rebuild my business tabs from bookmarks and memory. Appreciate your help, but still maintain that end users / customers should not be encumbered by having to go thru some sort of worm hole to restore sessions in Firefox after what's purported to be an upgrade. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I've spent enough hours on this issue to just cut my losses and move on.

Thanks for your support.

@jscher2000 Thanks for your help, but the procedure you outlined didn't work for me. Dropped the upgrade.jsonlz4-20220915150737 file to the box as instructed and nothing came of it.

The box did not fill with the decompressed data from the file? Or no data was listed after using Scrounge URLs?

@jscher2000 your solution was a really big help to me. I lost all my tabs when the latest rollout of Firefox hit my computer about a week ago. Using your tool, I went bak to an upgrade.jsonlz4 file dated at the time of the update. Read in the file, cconverted it to text and displayed all the URL's. Got them all back! Thanks for the great tool and taking the time to explain how to use it!