News Firefox user loses 7,470 opened tabs saved over two years after they can’t restore browsing session

[USAFRet]

I think having more than about 10 taps open is crazy, so to me, she is nuts... I kept thinking " is this a late April Fools joke? .... and why the hell isn't she backing these up?? The whole story has too many holes in it, so I assume it was a planted story to show just how great their browser handles large number of bookmarks because otherwise it makes no sense.

We've had more than a couple of people here with performance issues having "1000+" tabs open.
"I need those because 'day trader' blah de blah"

I laugh at those as well.

 

[CmdrShepard]

So another clickbait story? Have you no shame Avram? Don't answer, I know you don't.

Title: User loses 34,872,098,547 open tabs

Long pointless story about a dumb individual with apparently too much free time on her hands and way too little computer understanding ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... she managed to recover all tabs.

So a total non-story about a thing that didn't happen.

Again I ask the site editors -- why are you doing this? It's a horrible manipulation and you should be ashamed of yourselves. If this is the only way you can earn money then you really need to consider onlyfans because that'd be more honest work for a change.

Now ban me if you want for saying that, I don't care at this point.

 

[Starfal]

I also just lost over 4000 tabs. Sucks, the recovery thing just doesn't work for me, or I'm too stupid to do it right. Oh well, ive done enough crying lol, it's all over now. I always kept delaying it, you know.. the bookmarking and checking all the stuff. It's like house cleaning in a way.

 

[FoxtrotMichael-1]

This is not browsing. This is a mental illness.

 

[TheJoker2020]

2 years

Never updated her FF browser
Never updated the OS
Never powered off or rebooted the system
Zero backups
7,000+ tabs open!!

Sorry, but this is 100% self inflicted.


But wait...."Hazel retrieved those tabs-of-treasure thanks to the X community explaining how to restore an old Firefox browsing session from the profiles cache."

I have a hell of a lot of tabs open, but they are more of a reminder that when (if) I get the time I will go back and look at / watch whatever that was, some are simply there for reference, and whilst you can do this via bookmarks it's easier and faster to just keep on going with new tabs than to bookmark stuff, give it a sensible name, put it into a sensible folder and then remember where you were on your read/watch list. I obviously bookmark things that I want to keep on going back to (Toms Hardware for example is in a folder just for "Tech Websites").

I also routinely close tabs that I am done with, but even then I have over 450 open tabs in Firefox and yes that has been accumulated over at least a couple of years, Firefox DOES get updated regularly, Firefox DOES get shut and opened again regularly, the PC DOES get rebooted fairly regularly and I do take manual bookmark backups ever now and then, Acronis does it's thing otherwise and there is a simple way to save as bookmarks ALL open tabs in one go (I cant remember how, but that is obviously bookmarked).

As for performance, it really doesn't seem to make any real noticeable performance difference if you close it and open it again as it immediately only loads the last tabs you were looking at (not necessarily the tabs furthest on the right, out of interest sometime last year I tested it with a spare user account on the same PC with zero tabs open and everything else setup identically and didn't notice any difference. As for RAM usage, right now Firefox is using 1,303MB.

Is how I or how "Hazel" uses Firefox the ideal way, probably not, but it does have some benefits that I noted over and above only using bookmarks, and obviously has some drawbacks if no backups are made as per Hazel's story, but what is really quite impressive is that it doesn't just work, but actually works well and is pretty damned reliable compared to trying to do something similar with any other desktop app, can you image how things would work if you tried to open 400 MicroShaft Word documents.!

Ultimately the moral of this story is to make bookmarks for the stuff you care about keeping and make backups of your data including those bookmarks.

 

[TheJoker2020]

So, apparently ignoring this for 2 years?

Erm, no, you just go to settings, and on the general page right at the top click the button that says "open previous windows and tabs" then just do everything exactly as per normal with your PC otherwise.

 

[USAFRet]

Erm, no, you just go to settings, and on the general page right at the top click the button that says "open previous windows and tabs" then just do everything exactly as per normal with your PC otherwise.

Which this user ALSO did not do.

 

[TheJoker2020]

Which this user ALSO did not do.

I read the article twice, the language is not specific one way or the other, but I very much doubt that she did not have a powercut and did not reboot her Mac for 2-years, did not have Firefox set to "open previous windows and tabs" and did not close Firefox for two years and Firefox did not crash.! None of those potential things happening is very dubious, but I concede that the article does not give any specifics about these points one way or another.

 

[USAFRet]

I read the article twice, the language is not specific one way or the other, but I very much doubt that she did not have a powercut and did not reboot her Mac for 2-years, did not have Firefox set to "open previous windows and tabs" and did not close Firefox for two years and Firefox did not crash.! None of those potential things happening is very dubious, but I concede that the article does not give any specifics about these points one way or another.

Whatever she did or did not have set, or power cut, or reboot....there was apparently panic moment of "OMG! I lost my 7000+ FF tabs!!!"

Having that panic moment was a fail in and of itself.

 

[slightnitpick]

Right.

It will usually auto-restore.
Usually.

Not something I'd trust for "years".

That's why I also have Tab session manager in case the built in session manager fails.

 

[slightnitpick]

How does anyone find anything in that pile of junk?

The Chicken Kiev recipe....was that on tab 2,128, or 6,009?

How does she even remember where a certain really important tab is in that 7000+ mountain of tabs??

Firefox allows searching your open tabs.

 

[TheJoker2020]

Having that panic moment was a fail in and of itself.

If that should happen to me, I won't panic because I have backups etc, and now I know that open tabs lost between backups can be recovered anyway there is no concern at all.

 

[USAFRet]

because I have backups etc,

Same here.

Not all have that.
Especially people that freak out so bad it becomes a news article.

 

[TheJoker2020]

That's why I also have Tab session manager in case the built in session manager fails.

I avoid installing anything that is unnecessary, who makes this "Tab Session Manager".? I will take a look into it and maybe install extension No.2.

 

[slightnitpick]

I avoid installing anything that is unnecessary, who makes this "Tab Session Manager".? I will take a look into it and maybe install extension No.2.

I got it years ago from the Firefox add-on "store". But here's the creator's URL listed on the add-on's preference page: https://tab-session-manager.sienori.com/
And on Mozilla's page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-manager/

 

[TheJoker2020]

I got it years ago from the Firefox add-on "store". But here's the creator's URL listed on the add-on's preference page: https://tab-session-manager.sienori.com/
And on Mozilla's page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-manager/

Thanks, I will take a look at that tomorrow 👍

 

[35below0]

I have a hell of a lot of tabs open, but they are more of a reminder that when (if) I get the time I will go back and look at / watch whatever that was, some are simply there for reference, and whilst you can do this via bookmarks it's easier and faster to just keep on going with new tabs than to bookmark stuff, give it a sensible name, put it into a sensible folder and then remember where you were on your read/watch list.

It's true if it's 15-50 tabs, maybe you can do more. But something like 2k? I couldn't handle that many.
Dumping each interesting tab into a single folder on the bookmarks toolbar would not exactly be tidy but it'd be a lot easier to search.

I also just lost over 4000 tabs. Sucks, the recovery thing just doesn't work for me, or I'm too stupid to do it right. Oh well, ive done enough crying lol, it's all over now. I always kept delaying it, you know.. the bookmarking and checking all the stuff. It's like house cleaning in a way.

I don't think you're stupid, just the browser wasn't designed to keep that many tabs open foerever. It can handle bookmarks and it can handle a lot of tabs. Bookmarks don't get wiped.
Maybe it should warn you "hey, you got an awful lot of tabs open. better bookmark important ones in case of a crash or failure."

 

[Hartemis]

So, apparently ignoring this for 2 years?

Did you know that Firefox is able to restore the last session after a restart or an update? Her session takes less than a minute to reload, according to the article.

 

[Hartemis]

Right.

It will usually auto-restore.
Usually.

Not something I'd trust for "years".

Firefox keeps a backup of its previous session in the sessionstore-backups folder.
This folder should always be copied/backed up before restarting Firefox, in the event of any problems, crash or the like, before the files are replaced by the new empty sessions.
Then, using these files, you can replace the current sessionstore.jsonlz4 file to restore the lost session.
Less secure than a backup, but the technique with the most up-to-date tabs.

The Chicken Kiev recipe....was that on tab 2,128, or 6,009?

Easy. Firefox features a search engine for open tabs.

And if you have a spatial memory, you can also remember what you were doing/thinking at the time you were looking for that recipe. And you can remember what other tabs were open in that time period, the segment in your tab history.

 

[AlskiOnTheWeb]

Boy! I know how she feels! I backed up 100GB of data to 1.44in floppies last year and now I can't get them to load ... about 20 of the 630,000,000 floppies I used don't work. And here I was thinking I was doing good backing up all my "stuff"!

 

[35below0]

Boy! I know how she feels! I backed up 100GB of data to 1.44in floppies last year and now I can't get them to load ... about 20 of the 630,000,000 floppies I used don't work. And here I was thinking I was doing good backing up all my "stuff"!

A real nerd would have used a zip drive.

 

[USAFRet]

Firefox keeps a backup of its previous session in the sessionstore-backups folder.
This folder should always be copied/backed up before restarting Firefox, in the event of any problems, crash or the like, before the files are replaced by the new empty sessions.
Then, using these files, you can replace the current sessionstore.jsonlz4 file to restore the lost session.
Less secure than a backup, but the technique with the most up-to-date tabs.


Easy. Firefox features a search engine for open tabs.

And if you have a spatial memory, you can also remember what you were doing/thinking at the time you were looking for that recipe. And you can remember what other tabs were open in that time period, the segment in your tab history.

Not to disparage anyone, but do you really think the user in question was this organized?
If they were, we wouldn't be reading this article.

 

[slightnitpick]

Boy! I know how she feels! I backed up 100GB of data to 1.44in floppies last year and now I can't get them to load ... about 20 of the 630,000,000 floppies I used don't work. And here I was thinking I was doing good backing up all my "stuff"!

This would be funny if Firefox wasn't a modern, updated browser capable of both maintaining thousands of tabs in the browser window as well as session restore.

Plenty of people still lose sessions today with only a few open tabs. It's just something that happens occasionally even with the state of the art.

 

[sitehostplus]

So, apparently ignoring this for 2 years?

As they say in the military...if it works, don't fix it. 🤣

 

[TheJoker2020]

Dumping each interesting tab into a single folder on the bookmarks toolbar would not exactly be tidy but it'd be a lot easier to search.

I just looked at that to compare.

To search open tabs is a doddle, 1-click on down arrow to the right of the new tab button, one click on search tabs, type. It's quick and easy to do.

To search all bookmarks it's the same thing but starting with the bookmarks "star" button, also 2-clicks, type, so they are equally fast to search within.