How do I restore lost tabs
I just closed down all applications cleanly, including Firefox, and then did a Microsoft update. Firefox was in a a strange and very bad state when I restarted it after the update.
- Two of my three Firefox windows started up just fine, including all of their tabs -- that's the good news
- The Firefox window I was last working in, though, has MAJOR problems
- For the tab group that was active: It has a tab for each tab I had open when I closed Firefox, BUT all of the tabs are new tabs
- For all other tab groups: all of my tab groups exist, but all of them are empty -- no tabs of any kind
<rant on> Firefox has had tab loss problems for years, but I have never seen any this severe, and I have never seen any I could not recover from using the backup files. This is completely inexcusable -- losing user data is one of the most severe bugs a program can have, and Firefox has had variations of this problem for years. That has GOT to get fixed, once and for all ! <rant off>
QUESTION: how can I recover my missing tabs?
Edited to remove the leading line spaces which cause a catty-wampus display with this forum software and makes the message to go into overflow.
the-edmeister trɔe
All Replies (3)
Hi
Big changes are coming to Firefox soon that will see improvements in a number of areas, but in the meantime, I recommend that you have a read of this article that should help with this issue.
I hope that this helps, but if not, please come back here and we can look into a different solution for you.
I tried all files in the folder and nothing worked. Nothing had any tabs saved.
The page referred to mentions "sessions with lots of tabs" -- what constitutes "lots of tabs"? I had several tab groups, total number of tabs in the high double digits. That is the way I save state for things I cannot deal with at the moment, but want to get back to later. Loss of that state is a serous problem for me.
I cannot stress strongly enough my opinion that it is inexcusable to have this Severity 1 bug continue to exist for a long time -- years -- now. I have been a loyal Firefox user since not long after its inception. The continued existence of the Severity 1 bug is making me wonder whether it may be past time to reconsider which browser to use, though.
To be honest, I really cannot comprehend how Firefox could lose my tabs state when I shut it down cleanly. It should not ever lose that state, but after a clean shutdown????
By the way, I have been using the "Tab Groups" extension. I see the author says it is going away later this year, due to irreconcilable differences between him and Mozilla.
What is the best tabs & tab groups software that will continue to be supported? Since I need to recreate as much of the lost information as I can, I may as well also migrate to software that will continue to work.
Thanks