Firefox 2 and making Session Restore useful
UPDATE: This is set via the Main options screen in Firefox 2. The first drop box asks what should happen "When Firefox starts." Set it to "Show my windows and tabs from last time." This is the same as the instructions below.
People who have upgraded to Firefox 2 have raved about the Session Restore feature that restores all open tabs and even data entered into forms when Firefox is restarted. I love this capability of SessionSaver in earlier versions of Firefox. Unfortunately, Session Restore was really written to handle crashes. However, you can make Firefox 2 always restore the previous session, even when you closed Firefox on purpose.
What Firefox's Session Restore feature protects against is accidental loss due to crashes (or other similar failures). Why software needs to be protected against crashing, rather than simply NOT CRASHING is beyond me. Frustratingly, however, the blurb on the Firefox 2 Features page says that it should do what I want:
You can even set Firefox 2 to always restore your previous session instead of loading a home page, so you’ll never lose your place again.
The problem is that they don't tell you how to do this. It took a little digging to find the Session Restore page at MozillaWiki, where they provide the configuration settings. Of course, the information on how to set the configuration is somewhere else. Here is the basic process:
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enter "about:config" in the address bar to get the list of user preferences
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type "browser.startup.page" in the filter
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right-click to modify the value from 1 to 3 (1 is the default that opens the browser to the homepage only; 3 is the setting that tells Firefox to always restore the previous session)
And now that I have this working, I see that it is even better than SessionSaver because it restores more aspects about the session: it places me on the last-active tab, rather than strictly opening all the tabs again; and it is supposed to restore data in any forms.
10 Comment(s)
An easier way (for some people) to set Firefox to restore your previous session every time you close it is simply to go to Tools > Options > Main > Startup > When Firefox starts: and choose "Show my windows and tabs from last time."
said:
Argh. I looked for that several times. I don't know why I didn't see it. It's only the first option in the first tab of the Options panel.
said:
There's now a "playlist" feature in bloglines -- that's how I used to use session saver. I had something like "standard setup" -- I have one window with tabs for gmail, hotmail, bloglines, my timesheet, etc., then other windows for searching and other web stuff. If I remember to close the standard setup window last, then I can bring it back, but otherwise, poof! (I think!)
Hm, I could not find any of the settings either -- just upgraded from 1.5.0.8 to 2 under XP. Every time Windows is logged out with all apps still open -- a perfectly legal approach -- Firefox panics and thinks it's crashed!! Next time you open it you get a warning about it. How can they seriously not tell a crash from a deliberate exit?
I'll look into what chonhart posted and see if I can find something that will work for crashes and not clean exits. Else, this may be a case for Bugzilla and a customary five year wait while they argue about why none of the suggested solutions could *possibly* work...
By the way, SessionSaver was not this retarded, and it was perfectly capable of saving forms, session cookies and restoring the active tab. It did open all your windows in the wrong order, which was a pain because I tend to associate pages which which Firefox button in the taskbar they came under, and this order is all scrambled if I close Firefox.
SessionSaver does seem to be very slow, and in 1.5.x, is quite possibly what makes Firefox start grinding to a halt within a day or two of uptime, whereas with 1.0.7 (my preferred version) it would run for a few weeks before it was too slow to use. I hope that the built-in session saving in Firefox 2 is not as slow as SessionSaver ...
The instructions say to filter for "browser.start.page" but I don't get a hit. However, I did find "browser.startup.page" which has a default value of 1. Is this what I ought to be changing?
Thanks.
Firefox 2 has been giving me some serious issues lateley. Recently I installed the Google Toolbar in Firefox 2 and I’ve had nothing but problems sense then. The application all out crashes and I have to kill it from my process list. This morning... Read More
I tried changing the value in "browser.startup.page" to 1. tried changing Tools > Options > Main > Startup > When Firefox starts: and choose "Show my home page". Still FF2 is asking me if I want to restore the sessions each time I start it after closing down the computer without closing the FF window. Any other suggestions to make this question go away?
Thanks.
said:
EK and I had an offline conversation, and he's discovered another setting.
There is another config setting, as described in
the following page near the end. http://www.neveprise.net/main.do?id=howto-misc-firefox-kiosk
It worked. No more dialog box asking if I want to restore previous sessions..
hi cool stuff ..
i tried the method posted as wrote above...
and when after the saving of 3 from 1 number..
how do we know our session is saved or not...?
anyway is there a software capable of saving sessions in pendrive when offline..and be available when online or another pc..
Yeah Jack,
It takes a bit of tweaking to make it useful but once you toss the work at it is nice. I like to always have my blog login, bloglines and delicious open on start up. FYI there are a few good sites on how to use the config file to tweak FF even more. Here is a a link --> http://www.lifehacker.com/software/firefox-2/geek-to-live-top-firefox-2-config-tweaks-209941.php