Firefox 2 Beta 1 includes a new feature that restores your browsing session when the browser crashes. So, if you were looking at twenty different tabs when your browser froze or bit the dust, your tabs won’t go to wherever it is that electronic dust-bunnies end up.
Fire up your trusty browser and up will come all your tabs (along with a dialog box allowing you to stop this from happening, in case it was one of your open tabs that caused the crash in the first place). But what if you want Firefox to always remember your browsing session? Out of the box, Firefox should restore your browsing session when you restart from the Add-On dialog and, I think, when you suffer a crash. I’m not sure if an installed extensions somehow disabled my copy of Firefox, but mine was unable to restore tabs after a crash or after a normal shutdown.
The fix is quite easy…
Open a new tab (Ctrl-T) in Firefox and type about:config in the address bar. This will take you to the secret place where Firefox stores all your preferences.
In the Filter box type sessions to show only those keys including the word “sessions”. You may or may not see several lines beggining with “browser.sessionstore.”.
You need three entries (or keys) in your configuration. These are:
browser.sessionstore.enabled | Type: boolean | Value: true
browser.sessionstore.interval | Type: integer | Value: 30000 (equals 30 seconds, adjust to taste)
browser.sessionstore.resume_session | Type: boolean | Value: true
My copy of Firefox also has the following key (the previous three I added myself):
browser.sessionstore.resume_session_once | Type: boolean | Value: true
If these keys exist in your Firefox config, then you should be all set to use session restore. If not, then you need to create each one by right-clicking anywhere on the page, selecting New, choosing the Type of key from the flyout menu, and entering the key name and Value when prompted.
Restart Firefox and you may now enjoy the comfort of session restore.
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