How do I restore lost tabs
I just closed down all applications cleanly, including Firefox, and then did a Microsoft update. Firefox was in a a strange and very bad state when I restarted it after the update.
- Two of my three Firefox windows started up just fine, including all of their tabs -- that's the good news
- The Firefox window I was last working in, though, has MAJOR problems
- For the tab group that was active: It has a tab for each tab I had open when I closed Firefox, BUT all of the tabs are new tabs
- For all other tab groups: all of my tab groups exist, but all of them are empty -- no tabs of any kind
<rant on> Firefox has had tab loss problems for years, but I have never seen any this severe, and I have never seen any I could not recover from using the backup files. This is completely inexcusable -- losing user data is one of the most severe bugs a program can have, and Firefox has had variations of this problem for years. That has GOT to get fixed, once and for all ! <rant off>
QUESTION: how can I recover my missing tabs?
Edited to remove the leading line spaces which cause a catty-wampus display with this forum software and makes the message to go into overflow.
Okulungisiwe
All Replies (3)
Hi
Big changes are coming to Firefox soon that will see improvements in a number of areas, but in the meantime, I recommend that you have a read of this article that should help with this issue.
I hope that this helps, but if not, please come back here and we can look into a different solution for you.
I tried all files in the folder and nothing worked. Nothing had any tabs saved.
The page referred to mentions "sessions with lots of tabs" -- what constitutes "lots of tabs"? I had several tab groups, total number of tabs in the high double digits. That is the way I save state for things I cannot deal with at the moment, but want to get back to later. Loss of that state is a serous problem for me.
I cannot stress strongly enough my opinion that it is inexcusable to have this Severity 1 bug continue to exist for a long time -- years -- now. I have been a loyal Firefox user since not long after its inception. The continued existence of the Severity 1 bug is making me wonder whether it may be past time to reconsider which browser to use, though.
To be honest, I really cannot comprehend how Firefox could lose my tabs state when I shut it down cleanly. It should not ever lose that state, but after a clean shutdown????
By the way, I have been using the "Tab Groups" extension. I see the author says it is going away later this year, due to irreconcilable differences between him and Mozilla.
What is the best tabs & tab groups software that will continue to be supported? Since I need to recreate as much of the lost information as I can, I may as well also migrate to software that will continue to work.
Thanks