Firefox Restore Session

[Dante of the Inferno]

I use Firefox 19 on Windows 7 pretty regularly, and typically shut down Firefox the normal way. Today, I needed to install a web-plugin on my computer for a class, and it said that Firefox needed to be closed first. So, I closed Firefox, and the Task Manager showed that it was gone, but the Processes tab showed it very much alive. As such, I ended the process tree, and Firefox went away. After install the plug-in, I restarted Firefox, and the only thing that loaded was the homepage. No tabs.

Typically, this wouldn't be an issue. However, I have A LOT of tabs. How many? About....740-ish tabs just before the shutdown. I shut down and restart Firefox about once a day, but I never have any issue.

Before letting panic set in, I rushed to enter %appdata% in the Start Bar, and opened up roaming/Mozilla/profiles/XXXXXXX/and found a few sessionstore.js (sessionstore.js, sessionstore-01.js, etc) files and the sessionstore.bak file. Now, my current sessionstore.js file is 0 KB, which is obviously bad, but my sessionstore.bak file is 3,279 KB. So, I copied over ALL of these files into a safe external folder, renamed the sessionstore.bak file to sessionstore.js, and restarted Firefox. However, instead of restoring like a regular .js file, all it does is revert the file to sessionstore.bak and create a NEW file sessionstore.js. When I go to rename another file (sessionstore-3.js to sessionstore.js) and restart Firefox, it works fine.

Is there something different about the .bak file that it needs to be altered (more than just renaming the file type) in order for Firefox 19 to properly restore from it? Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.

[Dante of the Inferno]

Sure enough. I worked with a test copy of the sessionstore.bak file by renaming it sessionstore.txt. The header of the file started as follows:

{"windows":[],"selectedWindow":0,"_closedWindows":[{"tabs":[{"entries":

Now, I also renamed one of the working sessionstore.js files to sessionstore.txt and found the difference staring me in the face:

{"windows":[{"tabs":[{"entries":


Because of how Firefox was closed, it inserted the additional

[],"selectedWindow":0,"_closedWindows":

which royally screwed up the restore procedure. It wouldn't even give me an option to restore from a previous session. Once I remove that segment, I renamed is sessionstore.js, and presto.


Hope this helps anyone who should ever come across so annoying a bug.

[Irenicus]

Interesting. Have you reported this to Mozilla? They might be able to do something about it or they might say it's WAD (since you disabled the process through the task manager and they might have added that code for something else), but it's worth a try.

And lol, 740+ tabs. I've never had more than two dozen at most /noob

[applesauce]

Originally Posted by Dante of the Inferno

Sure enough. I worked with a test copy of the sessionstore.bak file by renaming it sessionstore.txt. The header of the file started as follows:

{"windows":[],"selectedWindow":0,"_closedWindows":[{"tabs":[{"entries":

Now, I also renamed one of the working sessionstore.js files to sessionstore.txt and found the difference staring me in the face:

{"windows":[{"tabs":[{"entries":


Because of how Firefox was closed, it inserted the additional

[],"selectedWindow":0,"_closedWindows":

which royally screwed up the restore procedure. It wouldn't even give me an option to restore from a previous session. Once I remove that segment, I renamed is sessionstore.js, and presto.


Hope this helps anyone who should ever come across so annoying a bug.

This solved my problem. You are the best!!
I just wanted to say thank you... I could not figure this out for the last 5 hours and I was going crazy/// I literally just registered to this website to thank you.

Thanks again

[Dante of the Inferno]

Originally Posted by applesauce

This solved my problem. You are the best!!
I just wanted to say thank you... I could not figure this out for the last 5 hours and I was going crazy/// I literally just registered to this website to thank you.

Thanks again

Thanks! I really appreciate the feedback. One great reason to use Firefox: the data files are open-source! One way to spare yourself the pain of relying on the session files is to use the add-on Session Manager. It lets you create as many sessions as you want, label them however you wish (say "Pre-FF27 Update"), and even create auto-saving sessions. It will also allow you to save the session files to another folder, should you want that extra layer of protection. It's a life-saver.

Btw, the current tab count is 860, down from 1350.

[Jaden]

I'm confused, why is it that you keep all those tabs open? And how?? I can open like 20 before my RAM usage maxes out. Besides, it gets super awkward navigating between them.

[Sackett]

Wow... I've never gone above 250 tabs open at one time