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Firefox refresh has deleted my open tabs and deleted bookmarks and history.

benglasson
benglasson
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It was not supposed to do this. All my logins are wiped too. What is the problem, and how do I fix it? It has also removed the menu bar at the top of the screen. I refreshed because FF was hanging badly, and this was promised to fix it, but not to delete everything. It seems to have switched to ESR 'update channel' Windows FF ESR 38.2.1

It was not supposed to do this. All my logins are wiped too. What is the problem, and how do I fix it? It has also removed the menu bar at the top of the screen. I refreshed because FF was hanging badly, and this was promised to fix it, but not to delete everything. It seems to have switched to ESR 'update channel' Windows FF ESR 38.2.1

All Replies (3)

Scribe
Scribe
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Hi, sorry Refresh did that. Please look on your Desktop for a file named Old Firefox Data - Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings.

For bookmarks only, you can try this: Open bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks > Import and Backup > Restore, and see if you have a backup there.

To bring up the menu bar (File, Edit, View, History, Bookmarks, Tools, Help) temporarily, press Alt. If you would like it to remain there all the time, right click in the tab bar (but not on a tab) and tick/check Menu Bar.

If your question is resolved by this or another answer, please take a minute to let us know. Thank you!

amanishakhete
amanishakhete
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I have this problem as well. The solutions did not work. I am deleting Firefox. That should save some valuable space and delete many problems with this so-called software. I am done with Mozilla's version of Internet Explorer.

Good riddance.

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Hi amanishakhete, if you want to salvage the URLs from your old session history file(s) in the Old Firefox Data folder on your desktop for use in another browser, look for these files:

  • sessionstore.js
  • sessionstore-backups\recovery.js
  • sessionstore-backups\previous.js
  • sessionstore-backups\upgrade....js

You can use JavaScript to extract the addresses from the file. The steps I've tested in Firefox are as follows, but you can improvise with your new browser:

One-time Setup:

(0) Install the "Session Extractor" bookmarklet (see the instructions in the top bar of the page for how to install it):

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/res/sumomarklets.html#SessExtr

To Extract the URLs:

(1) Create a copy of the session history file you want to mine for URLs and rename it with a .json extension.

Right-click the recovery.js file, choose Copy, then right-click a blank area of the list and choose Paste.

Note: By default, Windows hides the .js extension. This is all easier if you can see it. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hide-file-name-extensions

Right-click > Rename the recovery - Copy.js file to recovery.json (or recovery.txt if you prefer).

(2) Open the recovery.json file in a Firefox tab. Either drag the renamed file and drop it on an existing page to load the txt file in its place, or right-click the file and choose Open With and use Firefox.

(3) In the tab displaying the session history file, click the bookmarklet button to run the script. This should generate a new page listing the URLs of each open tab from the file. You can select and copy this list and paste it somewhere for safekeeping.

Unfortunately, if you want to save the page as is, there's an extra step: press Ctrl+U to launch the "view source" page, and save that as a .htm or .html file. For some reason, saving the original page gives you the original session file instead of the HTML.