Firefox is not restoring my tabs, I have a backup .js of my session but no idea how to utilize that file. Help?
After closing and reopening Firefox (version 37.0.2 on Windows 8.1), my 180+ tabs have disappeared even though I have it set to reopen my previous session each time I open the browser. The "Restore Previous Session" option has been grayed out from the beginning as well.
I've looked long and hard through countless threads where people had a similar problem, but it seems it usually got resolved by replacing the sessionstore.js file in the main profile folder with a backup .js of the lost session. Now, I do have a backup of my lost session, but there is no sessionstore.js anywhere, so I can't replace it with my own backup.
I know that one way to get the URLs of my old tabs back is to open the backup .js file in Notepad and painstakingly go through it in search of relevant URLs.. but I'm wondering if there is actually any way for me to just use that backup file to open my tabs in Firefox again? Is there something that's changed in newer versions of Firefox in terms of how they handle session restores and backups, since there is no sessionstore.js to replace with my own .js file and none of the old fixes work in my case?
I can't be the only one with this problem. I'd appreciate any help.
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Firefox creates sessionstore.js at shutdown. So you need to exit out of Firefox completely, then rename sessionstore.js to something like sessionstore.old, copy in your other .js file and rename it to sessionstore.js. When Firefox starts up, it should read the sessionstore.js file and then delete it. (Or perhaps it moves the file to the sessionstore-backups folder and renames it to previous.js, I haven't watched exactly what happens to it.)
I've tried exiting out of Firefox (and checked the Task Manager to see if it was still running in the background and closed that as well) but there will still be no sessionstore.js in the profile folder even when Firefox is closed.
And no matter what tabs I open before closing Firefox now, it will just open up my homepage the next time I open the browser. I haven't changed it in the settings to do that; it's supposed to open my previously opened tabs, but it's just not doing that anymore at all, so there's another issue, or an extension of my existing one.
I think if you have to "kill" firefox.exe using the Task Manager, then it won't be able to create sessionstore.js at shutdown and is more likely to resume using recovery.js (in the sessionstore-backups folder), but this is not something I have studied in detail.
Is Firefox creating and updating recovery.js during your session?
Do you want to try renaming recovery.js and substituting in your backup as the new recovery.js?
I think you just hit the nail on the head with the point you made about having to kill firefox.exe using the Task Manager. After I exited Firefox earlier, the Task Manager did say it was closed under "Apps" but still running under "Background processes," where I had to manually close it, and there was no sessionstore.js in the profile folder before I did that.
Now I checked the Task Manager again and since I closed the background process several sessions ago, it wasn't running anymore and a sessionstore.js had finally appeared in the profile folder. I guess manually closing the background process was what allowed Firefox to create the file and made all the difference then?
So now I was able to replace sessionstore.js with my backup and it actually worked. Problem solved!
And on the off chance this might be useful to anyone else - replacing recovery.js with my own backup didn't work. I tried it before and it would just delete my backup and replace it with a new, clean recovery.js with no tabs in but my homepage upon reopening Firefox.
Thanks a lot for your help, jscher, I'm really glad I could get my tabs working again.