Your open tabs are considered part of browsing history, so using the built-in features, there's no way to clear browsing history when Firefox closes AND then restore your previous session tabs the next time Firefox opens.

Alternatives:

(1) Same pages every time? You could experiment with:

Multiple home page tabs: How to set the home page

Notes:

• Addresses are separated by | when listed in the box on the Options page
• Also opened in every new window (Ctrl+n), as a workaround, you can bookmark a particular page and Shift+click the bookmark to launch that page in a new window

(2) Different pages? You could consider the "Bookmark All Tabs" feature:

This works on a window-by-window basis. Right-click any tab in the window, then click "Bookmark All Tabs". Firefox should show a small dialog where you can name a new folder that will contain the tabs, and control whether it is added to the end of the Bookmarks Menu or somewhere else.

When you want to restore the contents of that folder, expand it on the Bookmarks menu and use the last item on the list, "Open All in Tabs".

(3) Consider an Add-on? There are several session managers launched in the past six months. These are the ones that come to mind:

• Tab Session Manager: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tab-session-manager/
• MySessions: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/my-sessions/
• Session Boss: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/session-boss/

I don't use any of these myself, except for occasional testing.

Thank You!

It did not even occur to me to look for add-ons... I'll know better next time.

avoros57 said

Thank You! It did not even occur to me to look for add-ons... I'll know better next time.

hi, were you able to fix this? i tried the addons, none worked.

on versions prior to FF Quantum, the Session Manager addon worked perfectly for this, but with FF Quantum, we can't use it anymore.

strange thing is you can uncheck Remember my browsing history (thus no history entires created while browsing), but you have to uncheck History in 'Clear History when Firefox closes'. no history was created but it cannot be cleared anyway..

You can always clear history manually in the sidebar or the Library (history manager) or via "Clear Recent History" before closing Firefox. Only when you use "Clear history when Firefox closes" to clear the history then you can't restore tabs from the previous session.

cor-el said

You can always clear history manually in the sidebar or the Library (history manager) or via "Clear Recent History" before closing Firefox. Only when you use "Clear history when Firefox closes" to clear the history then you can't restore tabs from the previous session.

yes i am aware of the manual method. i just wish FF webextension had better support for session managers so that we can ditch the FF built in session restore feature and have options to deal with sessions and have a reliable crash recovery method (timestamped and auto backups/syncing of different sessions): http://www.tabmixplus.org/support/viewtopic.php?t=3

Hi dfk7, I think the issue is that WebExtensions do not have free and easy access to your hard drive like the old Session Manager. They can coordinate with a separate program ("native application") for additional functionality, but that is an extra challenge for developers and raises security concerns for users, so it's not very common.