How to loose your Firefox tabs

Submitted by dag on Wed, 2009/01/21 - 22:51

You think Firefox restores your tabs when you close and open it (with Tab Mix Plus or the session saver). Don't bet on it, try the following sequence:

  1. Open the Download window
  2. Open a few tabs
  3. Close the main firefox windows
  4. Open a new firefox instance (only the homepage is opened)

You have now lost all your tabs. If those contained any resident information or things you wanted to read/follow up they've been lost :-/

So if you didn't know the Download page was still open somewhere, starting a new firefox will loose your collection of tabs.

*sigh*

So how can one recover ? If you are lucky, you can find a backup file in ~/.mozilla/firefox/XXXXXXXX.default/sessionstore.bak that you can rename back to sessionstore.js and hopefully that one is not too old either.

Yep, not ideal, but that's

Yep, not ideal, but that's why I just use Ctrl+Q to quit. That makes sure it closes all windows, including the download manager.

Ctrl+Q works out of the box on Linux and there's an extension I wrote for Windows Firefox that adds Ctrl+Q as a shortcut for quit.

slight difference...

There is a difference. When i close multiple tabs, firefox asks me for confirmation *unless this is the last window open*.
So when I see the confirmation, then I know that there is another firefox window open somewhere.

I just tested this with the download window, same result.

So checking Preferences - tabs - Warn me when closing multiple tabs, might end your frustration.

Post new comment

Please refrain from adding URLs to unrelated or commercial websites. This site is moderated and comments with inappropriate links are rejected. Thank you for your understanding.
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options