Firefox's session managers strikes again, 50+ open tabs lost!

... but read on for a quick and dirty solution ...

New day, new gripes, but here’s a common one, Firefox’s session manager. Well it has improved a lot over the years, so much so that when my browser was eating 2GB and running like treacle due to what seemed like an extension memory leak, I turned off all extensions and then re-enabled the essentials one, I didn’t turn on the Session Manager extension, and trusted Firefox’s built in one.
 
Obviously one day the browser crashed and I restarted it as I had done several times, and expected it to offer me the option of opening the previously open tabs. For whatever reason it didn’t happen, I just ended up with a single tab. Restarting the browser again, hoping that it would pick the old session, was a mistake. I now had a backup copy that only had a single tab in it.

So this is point at which restoring old session store files etc. has all failed. Problem was that looking at the session.js file (found in the directory C:\Users\furbian\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\****.default) it appeared all my old tabs and some even older were present as a jumbly.

But no matter what I did, it would not re-open those tabs, maybe if I looked into how the file is structured I could find a way to move the old tab URL’s into the area where it reads those from when opening a new session? So I tried browsing for details on how the session store file is structured, and didn’t come across much, other than this :-

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=622036&start=30

.. and this ...

http://www.ghacks.net/2013/06/03/how-to-restore-firefox-sessions-if-session-restore-is-not-working-correctly/

These forums were useful, but I couldn’t get the HTML code to work, so took a simpler approach.

Loaded Sublime edit, opened the file and replaced all http:// with “\nhttp://” basically just line breaking before each URL, and now it was just gunk with a lot of URL’s on individual lines. Some had extraneous parameters added on, but I had a good list I could whittle down to the 50 odd tabs I had open quite easily, a few further search and replaces to clean it up, and that the job was done.

Oh I’ve now gone back to using Session Manager again, as it stores an excellent frequent history, and has never caused me to loose a single open tab.

Firefox, the slow awkward browser I 'have' to use and hate more day by day.

Yes, that's right, no one is holding a gun to my head telling me to use Firefox, and threatening to blow my brains out if I didn't. If I didn't do the former and the latter took place, it would be a chance in a million, due the country I live in. Actually it would be a chance in 2 million, with 30 gun deaths recorded last year, in a population approaching 60 million.

Can you STOP moving the Tab Bar to the top!

So back to Firefox, why is the Mozilla foundation determined to force me off their browser? Are they insane? First off they decided to go all out and copy Chrome in every way possible, bar the performance. The tab bar, why this insistence on moving it to the top? Initially you could move it back, but some thick moronic idiot(s?) decided that one must never have the tab bar on-top of the browsing windows and removed the option to move it back!

So try to find add-ons to do this, but none work any more after the most recent update, it almost seems as if some Mozilla developer has enjoyed doing this. Some more browsing and found a 64-bit build called Waterfox. I install this, and my Status bar 4 evar add-on no longer works. Great, find another status bar add-on, and I find one that barely works. Waterfox was just painful, I have a lot of tab groups open and Firefox browser will eat about 1GB of memory, I had 8GB so that was not an issue. Waterfox though ate 5 GB and would use virtual memory like mad. So I upped by RAM to 16GB, an excuse to get faster DDR3 RAM. Now it would eat 8GB and still slow down! I lived with it, until, they caught up with the build, 29ish, of Firefox that had rooted the tab bar at the top.

So I went back to Firefox and found an add-on for restoring the tab bar back to the top of the browser window that worked. The status bar add-on also worked now, so problem solved. At least until the Mozilla Foundation find a way to mess things up again.

Oh and that new Chrome style click down menu with icons on it, never use it, useless feature for me. Now a bit more on the Firefox teams other idiocies.

Integrated Widgets for web address, and the back and forwards browsing button, thanks again...

Moronic idiots strike again, seems like they had a team meeting, and the result? "Oh let's reduce customizability, integrate the address widget with the back and forward buttons!". Oh thanks a lot, I couldn't fix this one, and have had to get used to their enforced layout, after a good few miss clicks, I used to have the back and forward button on the left and the other buttons before the address box, so quite often click by instinct on the wrong buttons. I'd love to modify the cars belonging to the developers who did this, and move around some of the buttons on their car's dash board and see how they like it.

The status bar, "let's take that away from you shall we?"

Last but not least, the feature they killed quite some time ago, again team meeting and the decision was, "let's make the browsing experience a little less secure, because our browser is so secure and we're hard we want to show off". This time it was the status bar they so kindly removed. Now when you hover over a link, and by instinct I used to look at where it's going to go as the link flashed up in the status bar, you see nothing. Now I'd like to throw some darkish paint on their windscreens too and get them to drive their cars with that on it. You end up at a dodgy site, a spoof of a banking site say, so one big mistake made, but as you hover over the links, you are no longer told where you're going, so a click now would make bad situation even worse. Yes I know, look at the 'lock' for a secure site etc. and if you miss those signs you deserve all you get. The banking example is worse case. More likely you're reading some review of something on a smallish site and a link may just get you some malware fairly easily.

I'M ANGRY!

Yes I'm angry, because of the time I have wasted in trying to get around the Mozilla Foundations determined efforts to change how I use my browser! Oh 'let them know', how? By wasting time registering and being ignored? Because I've done so before and not much happened, so why waste my time again?

On a final note, why do I stick to Firefox and not use Chrome?

1. Tab Mix Plus, being able to customise my context menu, so that I can close the tab I am looking at, without going to the tab bar by just right clicking and selecting, close tab, priceless. Being able to duplicate tabs, again something I couldn't live without.

2. Download Helper, nothing like it on Chrome.

3. Tabs don't become micro sized (this maybe a Tab Mix Plus feature).

4. Tabs above browser window (until the Mozilla Foundation stop all add-ons that enable this position from working).

5. The Walnut (version 1) theme, I love the wood effect (I almost wrote, I love wood!).