Don't trust Firefox to backup your session
I just got bit in the ass by this.
I had my firefox open with all my open tabs as per usual. I notice that one of the tabs that I expect to exist is not there, so I went into my history and noticed for some reason, it covers only 2 days of history.
ducking told me to open firefox in troubleshoot mode to see if that would get me more of my history back. It did not but what it wound up doing is losing the session that had my open tabs. I closed firefox and re-opened it, all my open tabs gone. I power down my machine and started it back up, same story.
long story short, I am now following the recommendations on here to create regular backups of my firefox session cause apparently that is something that can be lost.
Btw the fact that is not a default feature of firefox to create multiple backups of your open session and deletes backups if you close and re-open is the dumbest logic imo
I never trust sessions to be permanent in any browser tbh. If something is important enough that I want it to remain after a browser restart I drag it to my bookmarks bar and reopen it after restart. Or with multiple things I just create a temp folder there.
Basically, don't trust any browser to have your session available on restart.
I'm not sure there's any reason that should be the case though. If bookmarks were unreliable, it would be reasonable to demand they should be, rather than to suggest one ought to keep their bookmarks in plain text in a dot txt or something. Sessions being apparently randomly ephemeral is a bug, not a feature.
I disagree, the name "session" itself implies an ephemeral thing - in any other context a session is a discrete, time-limited event. Why would one expect a session to last forever?
Well.... The fact that the session does generally persist between closes and restarts illustrates that there is recognized value in that behaviour. In other browsers it reliably works. Further, if the session were truly intended to be ephemeral why implement the restore behaviour at all? What would be the product-argument for implementing a feature in a way where it only sometimes works? Surely nobody would choose that implementation?
Beyond that, if people are using it in this way, and finding the unpredictable nature of the restore frustrating, then a better answer than "this isn't how we intend this to be used", might be "let's accommodate this use case".
On a personal level, this behaviour is one of my blockers in switching to firefox as my primary browser, and it sounds as though that's the case for a substantial minority of users. On edge or chrome one can just trust the sessions. They've not failed me in years.
Firefox is benefited by increasing market penetration to increase web designers' support of their browser; blockers to transition like these are counter-productive to their mission.
I mostly agree, I am just commenting on the reality of things as I see it.
There is a small technical argument to be made for sessions being of a different nature than bookmarks. Specifically due to it being dynamic storage which depends on more factors to wort right. Things like the browser properly closing and not suddenly being killed so that the session actually can be written. There also is a slightly higher chance of things going awry when the browser suddenly closes before the session can be properly stored. These sorts of things can be worked around by saving the session on intervals or based on events, but it is a much more complex mechanism compared to just saving a bookmark.
What it means is that sessions will restore most of the time but that there are plenty of edge cases that are difficult to account for. Hence, me not relying on it as an actual save mechanism.
Fair analysis. I think my other comment addresses this somewhat, so I'll be briefer here.
As I said, I don't trust it in any browser. I have seen it fail on Chromium browsers as well. If Firefox's version works less reliable, I honestly don't know.
That's fair. I may have just been much luckier with chromium than firefox
I also think you should never rely on a session being persistent. If something is that important then it should be a bookmark or something.
That said, I've used Firefox on my desktop for, I dunno, like 10 years minimum and the first thing I do is set the start up from "default" to "previously open tabs" and I've literally never lost a session, even on crash. Only time I did was when I closed the window myself with a new window open, so the new window would open on restart. But control + shift + t on Firefox has restored it every single time too.
To be fair, I need to use chrome for work now and it's also been consistent (although annoyingly slightly different) in keeping the session between restarts. Dunno about crashes though, not had a chance to experience that.
Pretty much this. Also: Searching history can restore a lot, too. I've been using Firefox for years, and can't remember even one time when I was surprised that I lost my entire session, and couldn't get back to key sites or tabs.
It's always a possibility... But I'd argue this isn't a Firefox problem, this is a data retention problem. An untested backup solution is not a backup solution.
I've had tabs persist through OS reinstalls by saving my profile folders and syncing from my phone. A crash could still purge all tabs, but I'll have both the profile files and a sync ready to go.
Kids these days forget that back in the 90s there was no such thing as autosave, the hardware was unreliable and the software was also unreliable. SSDs, autosave, and journaling filesystems have spoiled us rotten.
I still hit Ctrl-S every 30 seconds when I'm doing important work.
I still close apps and tabs manually as soon as I finish with them because of decades of limited ram and a decade of memory leak problems. I'm sure it does nothing for performance, but it makes my "space" feel clean.
I honestly don’t get people who don’t do this. Having 300 tabs is one of the most dysfunctional behaviors I can think of. I get trying to outsource your memory to your browser, but after you get to 20+ tabs - especially if you are not using vertical hierarchical tabs - you will not remember what is on them. I see people trying to go back to something they had open a day or so ago only to find they are on a tab that contains an even earlier version of the page that they forgot about before opening the tab they are actually looking for.
In my case:
˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗ Executive Dysfunction ˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗
I'm the same. I sympathize with @DefinitelyNotAFae 's executive dysfunction argument but I came up with the limited RAM of the 90s and aughts, combined with my own ways of working, (look, learn, leave) and I can't imagine having more than a few tabs open at a time.
I have a friend that works at Google that constantly complains about his RAM getting eaten up and I always ask "how many tabs?" and it's always around 70 on Chrome.
Tbf I spend no time on tab management, usually just mass closing everything (or the browser crashes or the computer updates, etc.)
And I switched to Firefox the last time due to Chrome and the tab memory issue
Totally get it, and yet:
I don't close individual tabs almost ever. To me they're a waste byproduct of browsing that doesn't deserve to be curated individually. Periodically I just notice that I've reached a stable state where I'm not using my tabs actively anymore and I just nuke everything back to a fresh state. If I'm feeling fancy I'll maybe pull like 2 or 3 to the side and use the button that closes all in a direction from a point. I find it's easier to just type what I'm looking for than to try keep stuff visually organized, and conveniently there's a bar right there that searches both my open tabs and the Internet.
Because of this behavior I don't truly understand the desire to keep a browsing session or the need to organize tabs into groups. I don't even use desktop shortcuts or anything of that nature. If I want to run a program I just press the super key and then start typing in it's name or keywords (ex. term opens a terminal, sheet opens a spreadsheet program, etc.)
I see. So what you are saying is that we now have to fight to the death. 😜
The thing that bugs me is trying to do something and not getting the expected result. That is why superfluous tabs bother me. The more tabs I have the more likely I have a close-but-not-quite match that will be useless to me and very likely could not be useful - it’s outdated or doesn’t have the instance specific state that I need. Organized tabs work better because I have a nearly tactile organization to things instead of needing to stop and think about words.
I also use Tree Style Tabs which keep things in a hierarchy for me. If I open something in a new tab, it’s going to be a child of the tab I opened it from. Moreover it collapses hierarchies I am not using by default but will switch to leaving it open when manually expanding them, so it intelligently adapts to my way of thinking. This is the main reason why I am weary at browsers trying to implement vertical tabs; they just don’t go far enough.
Things like sideberry and powertoys launcher have search features. It's nice to be able to hit alt+space, type "<" and then start typing the thing I want and just have it pop up
Edit-
And to be clear while i probably don't have 300 open, and think there is absolutely a point of diminishing returns (especially since aforementioned features can also search things like bookmarks), I'll usually have 50+ open at any one time at work.
I could have sworn that Firefox had this functionality already built into the address bar, but I just tried it and it didn't work.
You have to configure it for bookmarks and i don't think it does it with open tabs. Using powertoys launcher is nice because it's ALL open windows, not just browser tabs (which each is seen as a separate window).
When I start trying to open a duplicate tab by typing in the address bar it offers me the ability to switch to the tab with that site already open! Not sure its parameters but that is a thing that exists. Doesn't work with, say, a dozen YouTube videos unless I'm very specific
Ahh right the switch to tab thing. I forget that exists as it usually is just getting in my way. It's pretty hit or miss, and doesn't seem to work at all for some kinds of sites. I do wonder if you can configure it for better usage or put in some qualifier that forces tab searching, which would make it better.
To be fair i'm usually using vimium or launch at this point.
Me too. It's the kind of muscle memory that can only be ingrained after a terrible loss. Having to retype that book report in middle school taught me a valuable lesson about the fragility of life, and of Microsoft Word.
Like @creesch above, I would never trust a browser session to exist forever. "Old tabs" are not a storage mechanism, nor a replacement for bookmarks. I treat them primarily as a short-term todo list.
I used to be a heavy tab user, but I found that workflow was actually very detrimental to me. I felt disorganized, and wasted too much of my time "managing tabs" instead of accomplishing tasks. When others would ask what I'm up to, I'd sigh and say "Just working on my tabs...", while absently clicking through the links my past-self opened for me.
This isn't a good approach. Instead of focusing on what I wanted to do, I was stuck going through all of those YouTube videos I'd opened, articles I thought I was interested in but didn't ever feel up to reading, and Wikipedia journeys that spiraled out of control. Hundreds of fleeting interests from months ago, still weighing me down today.
I think it's largely a problem of seeing the potential value from consuming content (learning, entertainment, whatever), but not being willing to pay the upfront cost (time and energy). Yes, you could watch that hour long video on the Common Myths of World War II, but are you actually interested enough in the subject to do so? If you're not interested now, why do you think you will be in three months time? It's like we keep making the wrong value assessment over and over, and it causes things to pile up. It's better to make a decision and move on. Do or don't watch the video. Don't just kick it down the road.
Nowadays, I've adopted a strategy of making a point of closing tabs when I'm done with them, and to do frequent clean ups to prevent them from piling up. At the moment, Tildes is my only open tab outside of a couple pinned forever tabs for email and Slack.
I still have friends that are tabaholics. I wish I could say "recovering", but that's not really true. They still spend hours "managing tabs" every day. They still need to say "Hold on, let me close my browser" when we try to play games, because they're inexplicably out of memory. I ask them, "Why not just declare 'tab bankruptcy' and simply close them all?". They look at me with horror in their eyes.
I no longer see the appeal of that approach. It's a weight I'd rather do without.
I do use tabs heavily when doing research, pop open the first 5 results from search that look promising, then close them out.
But otherwise yes: tildes, fedi, and https://boardgamearena.com
I have Firefox tabs in some tab groups that have persisted two OS reinstalls over the last 4 years. I don't want to discount OP's negative experience, but I have a feeling this is not a common problem people usually run into, and they just got unlucky with a bug.
Yeah this has hit me a bunch of times. I use https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tab-session-manager/ to backup my tabs. UI is kinda horrible but it works.
I use sidebery mainly for vertical tabs and tab groups, but it also does session snapshots regularly / on demand. It is not perfect but the snapshots are very convenient.
I came to the comments section to recommend Sidebery too, which I also use. :P As you said, it's not a perfect backup solution, since there is always the possibility that Firefox Sync and Sidebery's Snapshots both fail at the same time... but that's a pretty slim chance, IMO. And even if they do both fail, Sidebery stores the last 5 snapshots (by default, you can set it to store more or even X days worth) so you can always try to roll back to a previous one if the most recent one failed somehow. And if you're extra worried about losing your session data, you can always set Sidebery to auto-export snapshots as local json/md files too, which can then be manually imported again later.
cc: @b3_k1nd_rw1nd
IIRC there was an old add-on like what @Happy_Shredder described, but it did it's snapshotting/restore by simply bookmarking all the tabs into a dedicated folder, which you could then load the entire folder at once.
Chrome can be worse in this regard, which is why I stick to Firefox. I like using Chrome not logged in, and I’ve done so since it’s existed. In the last few years it’s been trying to force people to log in using their accounts to track data better. I must have accidentally hit yes one day and it logged me in. I could no longer see my history and bookmarks on my laptop of 5yrs. I was finally able to undo the login, but the data was gone and unrecoverable. I still see my chrome somehow logged in from time to time, so I no longer use it as a primary source.
I gotta be honest with you, I was not aware that people relied on built-in browser sessions like that.
That's too bad that such a thing occurred...but i guess because i'm kind of on the older side, and grew up during a time when autosave didn't exist, and things were far less reliable on consumer computers, I often click Tools > Sync Now on the menu bar...and so far, things get preserved quite well; and especially across my devices where i am logged into. Then again, as others have stated, if there is such a need to really save hings, that's kinda what bookmarks are for. But, again, sorry that this happened.
I try to close my tabs and not get into a situation where I have the same tabs open for a long time. That said, lately I have been in that situation, so I've been using browser extensions (Session Buddy on Chrome, Tab Session Manager on Firefox) to keep my tabs saved.
Try Tab Session Manager. As a user of this extension for a few years now, the work flow is: press hotkey -> save current session (I'm in agreement with the thoughts that @kaffo and @CptBlueBear shared up thread).