New Tab Shortcuts wiped out by Sync
Hi all, I suspect I'm out of luck but I'm hoping someone might have some ideas ... I'm using Firefox 94.0.2 and I have become a big fan of the ability to pin shortcuts/bookmarks to tiles in the New Tab screen. I customized my New Tab with 9 rows of tiles, 72 pinned sites, a very useful & convenient feature.
I got a new laptop for work, installed Firefox and logged into my Firefox account. I ran Sync to copy some open tabs over to the browser in my old laptop. Somehow the sync picked up the setting of having 72 tiles on the New Tab page, on the new laptop, which was great; but instead of my pinned sites, the 72 tiles were populated by random sites (presumably pulled out of browsing history). No worries; I'd expected that I'd have to manually configure the new laptop's browser anyway.
But then when i logged into my old laptop this morning I was dismayed to see that the pinned sites were gone! The 72 tiles are still there, but the pinned sites have been replaced by random ones. Now I'll have to reconfigure my old laptop's browser as well. :-(
My question: is there any way to restore the previous pinned sites without having to re-pin them all manually? And once they're all back in place, is there some way to export/save/lock them, so this won't happen again? If having Sync enabled across my two devices is going to randomly wipe out my pinned sites, then I suppose the New Tab tile functionality is not so useful and I'll just use an old-fashioned Bookmark list.
Thanks in advance for any insights!
Chosen solution
Posting an update here for anyone else who might have this problem.
Digging around in this forum, I discovered that the "browser.newtabpage.pinned" setting in about:config contains a list of the New Tab pinned tiles. So one method for ensuring they're not lost would be to manually configure them & then save the list from "browser.newtabpage.pinned" somewhere, so it could be quickly restored in one shot if necessary.
Ideally, it would be nice to have some way to lock the pinned tiles in place so that Sync doesn't wipe them out. Perhaps using the "browser.newtabpage.pinned" list to ensure that all devices have the same pinned tiles would prevent this from happening.
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Chosen Solution
Posting an update here for anyone else who might have this problem.
Digging around in this forum, I discovered that the "browser.newtabpage.pinned" setting in about:config contains a list of the New Tab pinned tiles. So one method for ensuring they're not lost would be to manually configure them & then save the list from "browser.newtabpage.pinned" somewhere, so it could be quickly restored in one shot if necessary.
Ideally, it would be nice to have some way to lock the pinned tiles in place so that Sync doesn't wipe them out. Perhaps using the "browser.newtabpage.pinned" list to ensure that all devices have the same pinned tiles would prevent this from happening.
You can look in the sessionstore-backups folder to see if you have a upgrade.jsonlz4-<build_id> file with those pinned tabs. You can look at this tool to inspect a compressed sessionstore file.
You will normally find these files in the sessionstore-backups folder:
- previous.jsonlz4 (cleanBackup: copy of sessionstore.jsonlz4 from previous session that was loaded successfully)
- recovery.jsonlz4 (latest version of sessionstore.jsonlz4 written during runtime)
- recovery.baklz4 (previous version of sessionstore.jsonlz4 written during runtime)
- upgrade.jsonlz4-<build_id> (backup created during an upgrade of Firefox)
You can copy a file from the sessionstore-backups folder to the main profile and rename the file to sessionstore.jsonlz4 to replace the current file with Firefox closed.
- make sure to backup the current sessionstore.jsonlz4
Fantastic info, thanks Cor-el! I will check it out & post results here in case anyone's curious. Never looked into the sessionstore-backups contents before.