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After My Computer Crashed Due to a Selective Power Failure, My Firefox Tabs Refuse to Completely Load.

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After my computer lost power due to a selective power failure (we are not currently sure whether it was a blown fuse or something else), we Rebooted the computer after connecting the power cable to an outlet that works. Currently power is still of at both the original outlet, and several other outlets in the area, as well as a selective area downstairs.

Upon booting up Firefox (I have it set so that it will reopen any tabs I was viewing upon shutdown or restart or crash) I noticed that it was taking longer to load than usual (even accounting for the large number of tabs I constantly have open), and then after it had loaded that I could not access any of that tabs. I can click on them, and they will be highlighted if moused over, but the only thing that shows is a white screen for the actual site. I have included a picture of this. I have come to the conclusion that this is a Firefox error, given I was able to restart and recover all of my Google Chrome Tabs.

In addition to the Tabs not loading, Tabs to the left and right of the Tabs currently viewable are not accessible, and seem to almost not exist, if not for the lack of scroll arrows. In addition, scrolling left and/or right produces no response.

Normally I would grab the crash file and reopen the tabs from that, but I don't know whether I currently can, and current Firefox issues noted below make me leery of trying.

Upon noting that I could, I attempted to open a second Firefox session, and succeeded. However, in this session some of the same issues are occurring, mainly that I cannot search anything through the html bar, including opening websites by name (i.e. google.com produces but a blank white screen and no reaction), and there is no new tabs screen when I open a new tab (as I have set up in my settings to be the case). However, I can, for some reason, access sites from my bookmarks. The only way I was able to send this report is that Firefox automatically opened to a homepage when I opened the new session.

Needless to say, I'm rather concerned. I love Firefox as a browser, and not being able to use it is both concerning and frustrating. I hope to hear from you soon to resolve the matter.

Many Thanks.

P.S. If it at all helps (please disregard if it doesn't) the symbol that looks like a multi-forked branch on the modem is dark. I unfortunately do not know what that means.

After my computer lost power due to a selective power failure (we are not currently sure whether it was a blown fuse or something else), we Rebooted the computer after connecting the power cable to an outlet that works. Currently power is still of at both the original outlet, and several other outlets in the area, as well as a selective area downstairs. Upon booting up Firefox (I have it set so that it will reopen any tabs I was viewing upon shutdown or restart or crash) I noticed that it was taking longer to load than usual (even accounting for the large number of tabs I constantly have open), and then after it had loaded that I could not access any of that tabs. I can click on them, and they will be highlighted if moused over, but the only thing that shows is a white screen for the actual site. I have included a picture of this. I have come to the conclusion that this is a Firefox error, given I was able to restart and recover all of my Google Chrome Tabs. In addition to the Tabs not loading, Tabs to the left and right of the Tabs currently viewable are not accessible, and seem to almost not exist, if not for the lack of scroll arrows. In addition, scrolling left and/or right produces no response. Normally I would grab the crash file and reopen the tabs from that, but I don't know whether I currently can, and current Firefox issues noted below make me leery of trying. Upon noting that I could, I attempted to open a second Firefox session, and succeeded. However, in this session some of the same issues are occurring, mainly that I cannot search anything through the html bar, including opening websites by name (i.e. google.com produces but a blank white screen and no reaction), and there is no new tabs screen when I open a new tab (as I have set up in my settings to be the case). However, I can, for some reason, access sites from my bookmarks. The only way I was able to send this report is that Firefox automatically opened to a homepage when I opened the new session. Needless to say, I'm rather concerned. I love Firefox as a browser, and not being able to use it is both concerning and frustrating. I hope to hear from you soon to resolve the matter. Many Thanks. P.S. If it at all helps (please disregard if it doesn't) the symbol that looks like a multi-forked branch on the modem is dark. I unfortunately do not know what that means.
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ryanbp12 said

I have discovered something of note. Within the Recuva files is a file called "aborted-session.ping". I have attached a picture of it. Could this be useful?

It seems the file size probably is too small to contain useful data.

ryanbp12 said

And I've checked using the "C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\" parameter you gave me. Unfortunately, it produced no recovery files of any greater value then the ones I can access manually from my Firefox Profile.

Hmm, I can't help thinking the URLs are in that file. I regret that Firefox can't find them and the Scrounger didn't surface them, but if you go ahead and save the uncompressed JSON of your recent session history file and simply use Ctrl+f to look for a recent URL you're missing, are the URLs actually in there?

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You mean saving the file with the Scrounger and then looking through it? I can try it, but showing the url's with the scrounger doesn't show them. I'll give it a shot though.

There is another thing, as an absolute last resort, that I might try, if literally all options and every possibility is expended.

I might try closing the Firefox session that has the tabs in it. See, I'm not sure Firefox actually counted it as closed, but the data is clearly still there, considering that it still has the page I was opened to as the header. So maybe closing it will force it to properly be backed up, or force it to reload properly when opened again. Of course, it could also do nothing, or loose me literally years worth of irreplaceable tabs, so I'm cautious about even talking about the idea.

I've tried out the first idea, and I have good news and bad news. Good news is that you were right, there's definitively more to this situation than meets the eye with those files. When I tried to create an uncompressed version, it gave me an error message about the below. Do you have any idea how to fix that? It might get me access to the tabs. The first image is of the .jsonlz4, and the system allowed me to save the corresponding .baklz4 file, but for some reason I can't read it from the file itself, and it won't show the url's.

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That being said, your right, the text from the scrounger itself does go to the latest tab I was using, I recognize the url! This means that it's an error with reading the file and not a problem with the file itself (or at least it is one that might be fixed) :)

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I think the error messages means the decompression didn't work perfectly, or something corrupted the data in the file.

You might need to copy/paste the contents of the JSON box into a text editor and save (as plain text only). (I should add a button for "Save as Text".)

If even the older Scrounger couldn't build valid links out of the file then you might need to run a script against the file to just pull out the URLs without trying to preserve the structure.

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That might be more difficult than you think. I tried to "select all" and the tab literally crashed on me. It looks like it's to much content to select all at once. Similarly my attempts to highlight, cut, and paste bits of it at a time have also reached a "crash" of sorts. The page itself is loading, and I don't hold much hope of it ever finishing.

If you ever decide to add a "convert to text" function, now would be the time, because I'm uncertain if I can manually do so.

That being said, having gone through that much of the file, I can confirm that all of the url's are there, so after managing to retrieve the file as text from the scrounger, it will be a simple (if exceptionally tedious) matter to take and paste the url's to retrieve my tabs.

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Okay, I added two new buttons to the Scrounger.

Under HTML options, there is one to just pull out as many URLs as possible without the window/tab structure.

Under JSON options, there is a button to save as a text file without testing whether it is valid JSON.

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Could you send me a link to that version? I can't seem to find those options on the version of the scrounger I am using.

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You can try to decompress the file with code in the Browser Console.

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ryanbp12 said

Could you send me a link to that version? I can't seem to find those options on the version of the scrounger I am using.

You need to reload the page or possibly reload bypassing the cache (Ctrl+Shift+r, on Mac it's Command+Shift+r):

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/scrounger.html

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Hello. My apologies for being absent for so long. RL stuff happened.

So. I have good news and bad news. Good news is that scrounging the URL's directly from the look of it gets me all the missing links.

Bad news is that when I try to create a saved list, or for that matter even try and save the uncompressed JSON file as text, is simply doesn't work. The files exist, but they come out as 0 bytes. Opening the list gets me a blank page in firefox instead of a list, and opening the text document simply opens up a text document without any words in it.

Worse yet, I can't seem to actually close the previous firefox session. I click the x and when it asks me if I want to close that number of tabs, I say yes, and then it just doesn't close.

Would you recommend I try exiting the session? Or saving a backup and then verifying that firefox is still working fine?

Thanks, and once again, my apologies for letting this go on so long.

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Hi ryanbp12, do you have Microsoft Word or another program that understands HTML? Was thinking you could select and copy the list from the Scrounger page and paste it into the Word doc and save that if the "Save List" button in my page isn't saving the file successfully.

As for this --

Worse yet, I can't seem to actually close the previous firefox session. I click the x and when it asks me if I want to close that number of tabs, I say yes, and then it just doesn't close.

Would you recommend I try exiting the session? Or saving a backup and then verifying that firefox is still working fine?

-- it sounds like you might need to crash Firefox (e.g., in the Windows Task Manager, End Task on firefox.exe). It is a good idea to back up your current recovery.jsonlz4 file from

[profile folder]\sessionstore-backups

just in case.

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Hey. My apologies for not responding until now.

The option of manually saving the list has the same problem, trying to copy all of it causes the computer to freeze up, or just not transfer whatever portion I can copy.

Honestly I was hoping you might have some insight into why the list turned out as 0 bytes? Has this kind of thing happened before? Or is it something to do with the Firefox session that won't close? It has caused some notably aberrant behavior since my last response. If so, do you think I should close it? I don't want to lose any of my recovery files, but copies saved on the desktop should be safe right? I want to be sure before taking the risk of closing the session.

Finally, why I'm pushing for a list at all. To be blunt I can't really see myself using a manual list, and frankly I think (in my complete lack of experience and/or training) that whatever is happening can be fixed. Also, I'm just plain more used to a list.

Anyway, thanks for listening. Hope to hear from you soon. Sincerely. ryanbp12.

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Hi ryanbp12, first I just want to mention that threads are normally locked at six months old on this forum, so we might only have a few days left on this one.

Both types of save (uncompressed JSON and HTML output) are done by a script in the page -- it's not a normal download. So something is going wrong there that creates an empty file, but I don't know what it is.

The files that are on your desktop are not in active use by Firefox -- as you probably can tell by their last modification dates -- so closing/crashing Firefox shouldn't affect those copies.

The Scrounger uses some third party libraries for decompression, and Firefox sometimes goes to lala-land after that process, using a lot of CPU. I don't know why. An alternate way to decompress the .jsonlz4 file to .json is to run a script in Firefox's Browser Console that uses Firefox's built-in decompression function. The script for that can be found here:

https://gist.github.com/jscher2000/4403507e33df0918289619edb83f8193

(It places the decompressed file in the same folder as the compressed file you tell it to use.)

Alternately, do you have Google Chrome or Opera? You could try running the Scrounger in one of those browsers and see whether it handles your file better.

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Good news and bad news. Good news, the method of using chrome worked, and I have a recovery file that is consistent, and works.

Bad news, I can't get Firefox to stay up. I click on the shortcut and it either immediately crashes, and it then asks me if I want to restart Firefox after sending an error report, or it boots up, with the two windows' tabs being identical regardless of any changes made to them after they were opened again (and then eventually and invariably crashed again and had to be restarted again). To be more specific, any tabs that were opened before the crash are gone, and any that were closed before the crash are back. So both windows are stuck at a specific number of tabs, I don't know why those tabs have been kept.

When Firefox does open, I find that I cannot use the task bar (anything typed in there is treated as nonexistent by the system, only a white bar extends rather than the average extensions or suggestions), and the options menu refuses to open fully, and when it does trying to access the menu that would keep any existing tabs from reopening upon restart had a blank area where the options were supposed to be.

It's asking me if I want to start in safe mode. I've done some research, but I don't think it will help much. Should I do so anyway?

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For reference, when the crash is instant it gives me this message.

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And when the windows manage to open, and then crash (be it a couple seconds after or many minutes after), this message is given.

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Hi ryanbp12, Firefox's Safe Mode temporarily deactivates extensions, hardware acceleration, any userChrome.css/userContent.css files, and some other advanced features to help you assess whether these are causing the problem. When you exit Firefox and start it up normally, those restrictions no longer apply.

Safe Mode definitely is worth a try.

The Refresh option is different; that causes loss of settings and add-ons as described in this article: Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings.

Even if you don't get the little dialog after a startup problem, you can start Firefox in Safe Mode as follows:

Hold down the Shift key when starting Firefox. (On Mac, hold down the option/alt key instead of the Shift key.)

A small dialog should appear. Click "Start in Safe Mode" (not Refresh).

Any improvement?

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By the way, threads automatically lock after six months, so let's try to wrap this up by Wednesday.

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Got it.

Yes, both windows booted up without any problem, took a while but that's normal, and I was able to access the options. I plan to turn off the option that keeps has tabs return after Firefox is closed, and then close both windows. If neither return, then I will turn of safe mode and begin recovering the tabs that I lost when the second window crashed over the last couple months.

Sound like it's worth a shot?

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While you're in Safe Mode, you might grab the crash report URL you get when clicking through the latest submitted report(s) on the about:crashes page.

Ref. Firefox crashes - asking for support

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