Firefox crashes immediately upon trying to Restore my last session.
Hi,
To preface all of this, I'll come out and say I'm receiving strong hints that I may need to bite the bullet and replace a defective hard drive in the very near future.
With that being said, I had my Firefox broswer open with a slew (i.e. well over a hundred?) tabs open, many of which are important and I want to retain - or at least get a list of and copy down the individual URLs with pencil and paper if it comes to that.
Ever since its initial fateful crash, I can open my Firefox browser, but as soon as I opt to 'Recover last session's tabs', it crashes once again and I get a popup error window from Mozilla ...asking me if I want to either Quit Firefox or Restart Firefox (in which case the cycle repeats itself over and over again).
Like I said, I'm getting to the point where I'm almost willing to start from scratch, but I'd really like to be able to know what tabs I had open. 'History' is no help, because some of those tabs had been open for a week or more; plus I know that I've visited a whole lot more sites than just those in question, so trying to recognize them from memory in the History list would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
I guess in a nutshell, for now I'd just like to know if there's any way I can get a list of those open tabs without having to open the browser and have it crash immediately.
And if anybody has any clues about the crash issue, they’d be much appreciated. Not sure if reverting to an earlier version of Firefox might help me (at least temporarily), or if it would make matters even worse from a compatibility/security standpoint. …Maybe I’ll try disabling all my Add-ons? Or, I’ve heard about Firefox’s Safe Mode – What’s that about, could it help me? And if so, how do I invoke it?
Again, any and all recommendations are appreciated. Thanks!
All Replies (12)
Hi,
You can try starting Firefox in a new profile. You can then open this profile's folder via Firefox Help (Alt + H) > Troubleshooting Information > Show Folder, exit Firefox, go up one level in the folder hierarchy, copy/overwrite the sessionstore.js file from the crashing profile's folder into this new profile's folder, and start Firefox again in this new profile. You can also try to copy/overwrite on other systems by replacing this file in the same folder hierarchy.
OK, sounds promising, I'll give it a try when I have a chance.
Just making sure... that will enable me to go back to the old session at some point (ideally perhaps by opening one tab at a time until I find the one that is seemingly corrupting my session)?
Yes... usually you would get to choose the profiles (session) at Firefox startup. Please also make sure to not enable (tick) Don't ask at startup in the Profile Manager.
There are some methods posted in this MozillaZine forum thread to extract links from a sessionstore.js file
OK, well thank you both for your efforts. I was able to follow your well-laid out steps, dumdidadida. And when I came across the old (i.e. corrupt?) profile's folder and and the sessionstore.js file (approximately 35 MB in size), I figured I was golden. As you advised, I copied it into the folder for the newly-created profile and then opened the new profile with Firefox. Unfortunately I was greeted with disappointing results, as the browser opened with only the 'Welcome to Firefox' page, and not my missing tabs. Did I miss a step somewhere?
...cor-el, your advice sounds like it's for exactly what I want to do. However upon visiting that page you linked to, the novice in me pretty much got overwhelmed. From the discussion on the page it sounds like someone was trying to do exactly what I am. But what do I do from there? How do I go about invoking any of those instructions? (Do I use the Run command in the Start menu, and copy and paste the appropriate code into the window?
Any more advice you guys can give me would be great! Thanks again...
No, you open the Scratchpad (Web Developer > Scratchpad;Shift+F4) in Firefox and paste the code in the editor window.
You first need to set the devtools.chrome.enabled pref to true on the about:config page to get the Environment menu item that allows to run code at browser level with special chrome privileges.
The Scratchpad has an Execute menu with a Run item to run the code. Then you get a file picker window that allow to select which file to open. If there aren't errors in that file then a new tab is opened with the links of all windows.
OK, thanks, I think I'm headed down the right path now. But unfortunately I don't have any experience with Java programming.
On that page you linked to originally (the 'viewtopic' URL), I identified the following line of code that looked like it would accomplish what I want to do:
perl -lne 'print for /url":"\K[^"]+/g' sessionstore.bak
But when I type this into the Scratchpad and execute it, there's apparently a syntax error:
Exception: missing ; before statement Scratchpad:10
...which, like I said, I have no familiarity with what to fix.
Any further help? Thanks! :(
You would need to install a Perl interpreter to run that. You can also try the other JavaScript (not sed or perl) codes by the contributors. Please note that Scratchpad is for JavaScript.
I hunted around in those 7 pages of discussion from the contributors, but only succeeded in making myself more confused. Ugh.
So I naively tried opening the sessionstore.js in Microsoft's "Notepad". It worked, as far as being able to see URLs, and so I figured I'd just buckle down and separate them manually. But the whole thing is one huge jumbled mess, so that's a task I don't think I would wish on my worst enemy.
I'm at a loss for what to do next. Like I said, I read through those discussion pages, but nothing seemed very clear to me. Ugh!
Sorry to be a PIA...
Is it 35KB or MB? If it is 35MB then perhaps the file may be corrupt beyond repair/recovery and you may not be able to parse it successfully using the code. I have 44 tabs in three tab groups and it is only 30.4KB. Were you using Tab Groups?
It is indeed 35 Megabytes. (I can get carried away with my surfing.) I can tell there is some corrupted information mixed in, but the vast majority of it does contain recognizable links - they'd just be tedious to separate. I have a friend who does that type of programming, though, I'll see if he might be able to help me out.
Thanks for the link to that Firefox Add-on, I can see that coming in quite useful!
Are you running the OS as 64bit?