Firefox restarted and all tabs are GONE

Sorry, that’s frustrating, especially if you had a lot of tabs open. Before doing anything else, I’d avoid clearing Firefox’s history or deleting any session files. You can check History → Recently Closed Windows and see if your tabs are there. If not, Firefox may still have a backup of the previous session in your profile folder. Did Firefox crash during the restart, or did you use the Restart option from the menu?

Hello,

To find the correct solution to your problem, we need some more non-personal information from you. Please do the following:

1. Use ONE of these methods to open the Firefox Troubleshooting Information page:
   • Click the menu button , click on Help and select More troubleshooting information.
   • Type about:support into the Firefox address bar and press the enter key.
2. At the top of the Troubleshooting Information page that comes up, you should see a button that says "Copy text to clipboard". Click it.
3. Now, go back to your forum post, right-click in the reply box and select Paste from the context menu (or else click inside the reply box and press the Ctrl+V keys) to paste the information you copied into the forum post.
   • Due to a forum reply character limit, only part of the data may be pasted. You can use your mouse to select the missing text from the about:support page, right-click on the page to copy it and then right-click in the forum reply box to paste it into a new reply.

Note: The Troubleshooting Information page does not contain personal data, except for the full path to your profile folder. When you use one of the "Copy to clipboard" buttons, the profile path is not copied. Use other tools and methods at your own risk.

If you need further information about the Troubleshooting information page, please read the article Use the Troubleshooting Information page to help fix Firefox issues.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Maybe a key moment here:

I was having trouble with Firefox, so I decided to reboot it.

Does that mean you used the "Refresh Firefox" functionality?

That would make a backup "Old Firefox Data" on your desktop which you can use to copy any profile bits back, just follow How to restore a browsing session from backup and use the sessionstore files from the desktop backup folder.

Thank you, all.

Since posting, I was able to restore the previous day's tabs. The .jsonlz4 file that was from that day's date did nothing. The previous day's worked fine. It's baffling, because they're both almost exactly the same size, but the one that was more current just didn't work. Even odder, the first time, neither one worked. The second time, the newer one didn't work, but the older one did. This also goes along with an unrelated problem from about 6 months ago, where something that was supposed to work (restoring a profile with all of the add-ons working properly) didn't, and simply trying it again the next time, where nothing had changed, actually worked. There was simply no reason for it to work the second time in either case when nothing had changed, yet it did work.

@malcolmparked, thank you, and sorry to say, I didn't use the restart option from the menu. Firefox was super sluggish, and I finally just xed out of it. Absolutely, that shouldn't have happened, but it was way too slow and taking too long to do anything. Firefox hadn't crashed during the restart; it ultimately shut down and was actually quite fast in bringing up the single-tab browser.

@ItsWempo, thanks, I do have the about:support text copied into a text file and can print it here if requested, but with the problem resolved, do you still need it?

@jbr, thanks, I didn't use the "refresh Firefox" function; Firefox was sluggish and I finally xed out of it. That's something I usually avoid doing, but this time, Firefox was taking too long to respond.