Firefox Support Forum

Firefox was hanging up. I got frustrated and I ended the session using task manager. On restart my windows came back, but the tabs were missing the page information. I ended the firefox session again, and did a restart of windows for good measure, hoping to get everything restored.

Then, when windows restarted, I restarted firefox, and I was presented two options - SAFE MODE, or REFRESH. I did SAFE MODE. Things looked ok, so I ended that session, and tried restarting again, hoping to restart normally, without SAFE MODE on. I got the same two options again - SAFE MODE or REFRESH. So, I thought REFRESH would get me back to my prior session. Nope. That reloaded a bunch of things, like bookmarks, etc. and gave me a new session.

So, I looked under the three line menu. No ability to RESTORE PREVIOUS SESSION!

I also looked in my profile as found in ABOUT:SUPPORT - PROFILE FOLDER, and in my SESSIONSTORE-BACKUPS folder in my profile folder my RECOVERY.baklz4, and my RECOVERY.jsonlz4 have todays date as DATE MODIFIED, but only are 33kb each - way to small for the hundreds of tabs I had open in multiple windows - I believe.

So, do I have any other recovery session folders available that I might be able to use?

Before shutting down Firefox I deleted history/cache/passwords etc from the past day

I do this all the time but since I had restore previous tabs selected they always get restored when I start up again

However this time they weren't restored when I restarted

Without closing Firefox I navigated to the sessionstore-backups folder to see what was there but the files were only 2KB - much too small for the number of tabs.

So I installed ShadowExplorer & Shadowcopyview to see if I could recover older versions I was able to locate jsonlz4 files from a few days ago that were around 11000KB in size so I assumed they would have most of my tabs

However when trying to use the files nothing happens - I tried 2 different steps that I read here had worked for others

1 - Renaming previous.jsonlz4 to sessionstore.jsonlz4 , moving to the profile folder (deleting the old one first) and restarting FF

2 - Deleting sessionstore.jsonlz4 and copying the recovered previous.jsonlz4 / recovery.baklz4 /recovery.jsonlz4 / upgrade.jsonlz4-20201014125134 files to the sessionstore-backups folder and restarting FF

I also repeated the steps after creating a separate profile

None of these worked so I tried examining the jsonlz4 files using https://www.jeffersonscher.com/res/scrounger.html but I got an error message 'Session history file contents could not be read?'

Now I've previously used recovered Jsonlz4 files to restore tabs with no issues but this time they won't work

I read here https://support.mozilla.org/bm/questions/1189759 that updates may cause compatibility issues and the upgrade.jsonlz4-20201014125134 file indicates they was a recent update

The recovered file sizes indicate they contain data so I want to know how I can recover it - if not through FF then through some other software

I have many tabs like 200-300. Firefox crashed today. I also have 4GB page file on top of that. Strange! After I restarted Firefox it was using only 6.8GB RAM. Perhaps memory leak. BTW if I have browser.cache.disk.enable set to false. Is page file still used?

Thanks for help.

Hello,

I just installed the new update. The new tab design is totally confusing/unclear to me. Especially the fact that the new tabs don't have a "seperator-line" to the next tab. Thats totally disturbing to me. It's really difficult for me to keep the overview about my normally around 60 tabs now. Is there an option to switch back to the old tabs look and feel? Are there other options to customize the look of the tab bar?

Thanks in advance and Greetz!

To explain visually, this is what I want removed:

[img]https://i.vgy.me/mG32hM.png/img

I found another thread on that with a solution:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1280633

However that solution doesn't work for me. Did something change?

I would ask in that thread but it's closed (pretty ridiculous) so here's a new thread to add to the clutter.

I have a portable installation of Firefox. Might that be the problem?

Hi!

I had two Firefox windows open at the same time, one with a lot of tabs open in it, and one with only a few open. I was going to close firefox in order to restart the computer, and closed the window with many tabs in it first, and then I closed the window with only a few tabs in it. The next time I started Firefox, only the window with a few tabs in it loaded, and not the other window in which I had the vast majority of all opened tabs. And I can't find any way to restore the tabs from the other window either. I have looked under the History menu, but I don't see any option to restore a previous session there, so I'm guessing that Firefox thinks that it already has restored the previous session when I opened it up again.

So, how can I restore the tabs I had in the other window, with a lot of tabs opened?

I had so many problems with it, I went through downloading different "session save" add-ons, I know what solution you guys will give me, I've done most of the posts' instructions, this is more of a complaint post.

When Windows boots up and you had Firefox open before you shut down last time, it will open anew, automatically, with your previous session, but it's on the end of the list of things that launch on startup.

Forgetting you had it on and clicking the browser again, will open a new session with the home screen instead of the previous session, then when actual session Firefox launches it's a 50/50 whether it will be in home screen as well, or actually in your previous session. Now here is the fun part. If you close the new window with just the home tab, that will now become the latest session, so your previous one will be deleted.

How to get around that? Move your home tab into your session instead of closing the window, it works 100% of the time... But can we, not start a new session if you close the home screen, or if you close just 1 tab it doesn't count as a different session. I dunno, just throwing ideas out there.

Hope this reaches those with the same issue, or people in positions to fix the issue, if anyone wants to use session saving add-ons, I took fancy to Tab Session Manager and Easy Session Manager, though not perfect, I don't advise for over 150 tabs.

I'll try to be as active on this thread as I can be, thanks for reading through! :>

Middle-click to open in new tab is wildly inconsistent, even on the same link on the same site in the same session. I'd say it works about 10% of the time after the recent 78.0.1 update. I verified my mouse's middle-click operation at https://www.onlinemictest.com/mouse-test/, so I know the middle-clicks are registering and the problem is with Firefox.

All of a sudden, my Firefox browser started Opening links in new windows instead of new tabs. In tools>options>tabs: Open links in tabs instead of new windows is check marked. it still opens in new window

I had Firefox opened in a main windows with maybe 50 tabs of tabs I wanted to look at (documentaries, stand-up shows, stuff from work etc). I opened a second window and while navigating in the second window I mistakenly close the main. As one does, I hit Open recently closed window. Guess what? Firefox opens a window from yesterday and a few more empty ones, but not the one I just closed. Can someone help me with this?

I use Send Tab to Device all the time. To my phone, my tablet, my work & home laptops. Except recently, the tab I send won't show up on my phone. Notifications are enabled. I can send from my phone to my work laptop. I can send from my work to home laptop. But to the phone, it says sent, and nothing ever arrives. Everything is synced. What else can I do?

Help, how can I go BACK to the last version of Firefox?? I HATE Version 89. Not only do the new tabs all blend in with each other because they're all the same color, but they're placed lower in the screen and add a strip of unused dead space along the top of screen, which means the content I want to see is all pushed down into a smaller, squished space. Arg - already getting high blood pressure trying to navigate it!

I am running on a new iMac. Every time I click on an email link two windows open. One window is my the home page I have set up and the second is the page that the email link takes me to. How do I have Firefox just open the window I go to via the link? This never happened before on my old system

Hi,

I lost all my windows and tabs on the latest firefox upgrade and I am trying to restore the session.

I've done this many times in the pat and I know it is as simple as renaming the old session file and moving it, but I never seem to remember exactly what I need to rename and move! I wish there was a simple tool that did this, as I always seem to waste a lot of time trying to remember and figure it out.

Anyway, I found the previous session in the backup session folder . I renamed it: "sessionstore.jsonlz4" and moved it to the main folder - but this didn't work. Actually, whatever happened it erased the file! Fortunately I still have another version of the file backed up.

What do I need to name this file and where do I need to put it so that Firefox will recognize it as a previous session and allow me to load it?

Thank you for your help.

Hi. I would like to restore my previous session when I open Firefox (last version of the browser installed). The option is turned on, but nothing happens when I close the browser and I open it again. The support says I should see "Restore previous session" after "New Private Window", but this option is not there. In the history, the list of recently closed tabs is always empty, there are juste one or two links in the recently closed windows (it seems to be a random list). Can someone help me ? I don't understand why it doesn't work. Thank you :)

I'd been having issues with connectivity (local issues, wireless AP connection), and one day this week the browser had issues loading my saved tabs, I'm suspecting because of my poor connectivity, so I close the browser, disconnect from my AP, reconnect, fire up Firefox again (it tells me it's applying updates before it loads up), and a blank screen with my homepage loads up instead of my saved tabs and settings. I don't know what's caused that, but it's led to the issues I'm having now.

I laid out the page the way it was before I was having these connectivity issues, with 5 app tabs (Gmail, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and one other) and a few normal tabs. I closed the browser, reopened, and now what it's doing is making the Facebook app tab and the Instagram app tab open up as normal tabs, unlike before when they stayed as app tabs. To be clear, if I rearrange these two to be app tabs and shut down the browser, then reopen it, the app tabs begin as normal when the browser opens, until they start loading up... THEN it changes ONLY THESE TWO app tabs back to normal tabs.

Nothing has changed in my settings; I don't clear browser history on exit, I have Restore Previous Session always ticked. I still can't tell what's causing this.

Today, after I tried to uninstall some mouse drivers leading to a freeze and reboot, my firefox upon starting lost hundreds of open tabs I had, only restoring 1 tab which I am pretty sure I did not even have open. I have already followed solutions in similar problems like this (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1310742), which did not work. First I used shadowexplorer to recover sessionstorebackup files from a restore point on 10/15, most of which did not seem to open anything when using them with the scrounger tool. One of them did open, however it only showed 2 tabs when I would have had hundreds. None of these files did anything when I renamed them to sessionstore.jsonlz4 and placed them in the appropriate folder, even if I deleted the original sessionstore file. Firefox also seemed to be able to recover tabs which I opened after the loss of the original tabs, and renaming and replacing of the sessionstore file until I tried deleting the entire sessionstore backups folder.

I also tried simply doing a system restore back to 10/15, which also failed to help. After doing a system restore, I also tried the whole process of recovering sessionstore backup files and replacing them again, however nothing changed again. I also tried recovering the sessionstore.jsonlz4 file directly and using that to replace my current sessionstore.jsonlz4 file, but that also did not work. The replacement files do seem to contain tabs, as most of them are around a couple MBs large, but after I place them in and restart firefox they get reduced in size back to almost nothing.

The only thing I have not tried is using files from an even older restore point on 10/12, although after having restored to the 10/15 point my 10/12 restore point seems to have disappeared. I can try undoing the restore in order to try to view the 10/12 restore point again, but this process takes multiple hours and I would rather not.