Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Why impossible to recover to previos session if Firefox crash and you restart it?

  • 4 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 3 views
  • Last reply by Likamorea

Likamorea
Likamorea
more options

I open Firefox - it's open many empty tabs. In hope to recover my lost tabs I closed Firefox and open again in hope it will show button - recover from last session, but it's open again many new empty tabs and nothing more.

I click on History menu in hope to click on Restore Previous session, but this menu inactive... It's make me so angry, I had 300 tabs and now all of them simply EMPTY OPENED TABS!!!

And this stupid Firefox rewrited previous session with new crashed session, so I even can't open previous worked session.

And my grouped tabs impossible to save, because sometimes I have crash when all tab groups is gone and all tabs simply ungrouped in one window, and I need to spend few hours to group each tab in own group. Why it's impossible to save automatic tab groups somewhere? Why developers can't do so easy things in Firefox and we need to spend a lot of time to recover from crashes? Why impossible simply to save sessions by time? so every session will be available from previous days? Why if some script crash - whole Firefox crash and if some tab crash - impossible to know which tab script hang? Why if script stopped responding - Firefox can't remove that script from running so other tabs will work? Why in tab groups I can't select few tabs at once and drag them to other group or remove them?

It's always russian roulette when you close Firefox because every new click on Firefox icon and start can be simply crashed session and you will see many opened EMPTY tabs.

I open Firefox - it's open many empty tabs. In hope to recover my lost tabs I closed Firefox and open again in hope it will show button - recover from last session, but it's open again many new empty tabs and nothing more. I click on History menu in hope to click on Restore Previous session, but this menu inactive... It's make me so angry, I had 300 tabs and now all of them simply EMPTY OPENED TABS!!! And this stupid Firefox rewrited previous session with new crashed session, so I even can't open previous worked session. And my grouped tabs impossible to save, because sometimes I have crash when all tab groups is gone and all tabs simply ungrouped in one window, and I need to spend few hours to group each tab in own group. Why it's impossible to save automatic tab groups somewhere? Why developers can't do so easy things in Firefox and we need to spend a lot of time to recover from crashes? Why impossible simply to save sessions by time? so every session will be available from previous days? Why if some script crash - whole Firefox crash and if some tab crash - impossible to know which tab script hang? Why if script stopped responding - Firefox can't remove that script from running so other tabs will work? Why in tab groups I can't select few tabs at once and drag them to other group or remove them? It's always russian roulette when you close Firefox because every new click on Firefox icon and start can be simply crashed session and you will see many opened EMPTY tabs.

All Replies (4)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

You can check the sessionstore-backups folder in the Firefox profile folder to see if there is a possible upgrade.js-<build_id> file from a recent update in case you had those tabs open back then.

You can backup the session files in the sessionstore-backups folder in the Firefox Profile Folder to make sure not to lose possible important session data. 

previous.js (cleanBackup: copy of sessionstore.js from previous session that was loaded successfully)
recovery.js (latest version of the sessionstore written during runtime)
recovery.bak (previous version of the sessionstore written during runtime)
upgrade.js-<build_id> (backup created during an upgrade of Firefox)

You can copy a file from the sessionstore-backups folder to the main profile and rename the file to sessionstore.js to replace the current file (make a backup copy of the current sessionstore.js).

You can use this button to go to the current Firefox profile folder:

Likamorea
Likamorea Question owner
more options

And yes, I have upgrade.js- files but they few months old and I need tabs which I created in last week.

I think it's too late to copy crashed session files if they crashed to a backup folder, and I think in 2015 really dumb to do it every day or few times in a day and spend hours on it to find them and copy every time you close Firefox. I think we live now not in 1990 when this maybe was a problem for programmers to do in own product. I think in 2015 it need to be automatic and Firefox need to have some folder with all previously saved sessions and in settings you need to select how frequently you want to save sessions, every day, week, or hour, and yea, we have enough free space on HDD for it, even on laptops.

the-edmeister
the-edmeister
  • Moderator
more options

There are add-ons which enhance the Firefox session saving feature, and save multiple "previous sessions".

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=session&appver=39.0&platform=windows

As far as "dumb" goes, working with many hundreds of open tabs fits in that category - IMO.

Likamorea
Likamorea Question owner
more options

It's not dumb if this tabs located in groups and each group have 10-20 tabs.

And this session apps need to be set by default in Firefox, because no guaranty they will work in new version. Especially if people notice this problem only when every session is crashed and impossible to recover.

But, thank you for link, now I will be need to use all the time some addons to save session every minute, cos you never know when Firefox will crash and crash session. And still it's doesn't solve the problem if session crash, it's only help if it will crash again in future. For this it need to be build in by default.