Hi battles_atlas, sorry to hear about this problem. Is this related to a particular kind of device, such as display, memory, disk, or audio:

Hi I'm having occasional BSODs at the moment, usually get an IRQL message.

In case it is display-related, could you try disabling Firefox from using hardware acceleration? This is a potential workaround for incompatibilities between Firefox and your graphics card/chipset driver software. This article describes where to make that change: Firefox's performance settings. This will take effect the next time you exit Firefox and start it up again. Any difference?

Since hardware acceleration improves the appearance of fonts and animations, you may want to check whether graphics card/chipset driver updates are available for your system. This article suggests safe ways to do that: Upgrade your graphics drivers to use hardware acceleration and WebGL.

Main annoyance though is that after reboot all my tabs in Firefox are gone, including the pinned tabs which I use for common sites. Everything else is fine though. But redoing this every time getting very annoying. Is there something I can do to stop this?

Firefox should attempt an automatic restore after a crash. You also could look for:

• "3-bar" menu button > Restore Previous Session
• (menu bar) History > Restore Previous Session

If they are missing or grayed, check either:

• "3-bar" menu button > Library > History > Recently Closed Windows
• "Library" toolbar button > History > Recently Closed Windows
• (menu bar) History > Recently Closed Windows

No?

Firefox keeps multiple session history files to help recover after crashes. If none of them are found at restart, you might need to use an extension that stores sessions in your bookmarks -- those hopefully are holding up through these crashes.

These are the ones I'm aware of that you might investigate/try out:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/session-sync/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/my-sessions/

Having the extra data show up when you are searching your bookmarks may be annoying, so you also could consider extensions that use databases, but these also could be corrupted by a sudden shutdown:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tab-session-manager/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/session-boss/

Hmm, after re-reading your question, you might also look at whether you have any "cleaners" that run at Windows startup that remove browser data such as history.

Hi. I dont have hardware acceleration on as was causing screen tear issues with my GSync monitor. I dont think the crash is Firefox related.

No cleaners either that would explain this.

I haven't tried diagnosing the BSOD yet, but my hunch is its audio as couple of crashes been triggered by playing audio through VLC (which is fully updated, as is my audio drivers).

Anyway back to Firefox, I have no option to recover the history - its blank. Find it weird that bookmarks, my login session etc recover fine, but these all vanish!

I'll take a look at those links you gave soon as I get the chance.

To fix this, either right-click on a tab and select 'Reopen closed tab' from the context menu or press Ctrl+Shift+T. Alternatively, head to the menu (the three dots at the top right of the screen) and click it. Scroll down to 'History' and you'll find the most recent tabs closed.

https://hardsoft-support.kayako.com/article/71-how-to-troubleshoot-a-blue-screen-of-death-bsod

As I said to the first reply, there are no saved tabs. My history is there, but all the tabs I had open have vanished.

BTW I don't have any 'Reopen closed tab' option. I can Undo close tab - is that what you meant?

Hi battles_atlas, in Firefox, you are correct, it is called Undo Close Tab.

I'm still running into this issue occasionally - luckily system is more stable now, but today had same occurrence of a BSOD whilst Firefox was open, then on reboot everything is still there (bookmarks, history) except that all my open tabs are gone, and there is no session restore option.

Just wondering if anyone else has any idea about what is happening here?

Well, a BSOD halts the system, and corrupts temp files, and data which was not written to disk yet disappears into the ether.

Making sure that ☰Menu → Options → Restore Previous Session box is ticked might help.

But when the OS halts hard, it isn't like an application can sneak in some housekeeping, which is likely why you don't get an offer to restore the previous session even if you get a "Firefox didn't close properly last time" message.

That makes sense intuitively, though isn't this why systems use back up files? Like why doesn't Firefox periodically save open tabs to a file which it can then recover from, just as it presumably does with bookmarks and history?

Just posing the question here. Given that it seems most of us these days essentially use open tabs as a To Do list, it seems like an odd oversight to not protect them more.

Actually how does sync work? I don't have another computer I want to sync these tabs to, and hence never used it, but if that is possible, why isn't it possible to sync tabs to the cloud and back to my machine when needed?

Hi battles_atlas, Firefox stores open tabs to a second file during your session to provide protection against corruption of the main file. Sync has the option to sync open tabs. Does Firefox need to do more? Hard to say.

You can use add-ons to provide additional storage. Please refer to my reply from November 4th about that.

Yes, i though Sync did tabs, but not something i use either.

Firefox does try to save your tabs, and probably saves every time your tabs change. It's how you can use the Restore Previous Session feature, or why tabs are offered for restore when FF crashes. Sometimes a BSOD can wreak havoc in the way it kills the system, especially certain kinds of BSOD (like the hardware or driver ones that just strangle Windows, versus the ones where Windows just thought it might be a good idea to BSOD to stop anything worse happening).

I don't know how FF handles all of its I/O, but the only thing that might help is less lazy writing, if any, but that is as much on the OS as any application. And things going wrong leading up to BSOD may just interfere with flushing data to disk properly. If a tab is crashing, or crashes happen while loading or closing a tab, that would certainly be a good candidate for causing no session to be recovered, if happening while FF is writing the changes when everything goes sideways.

I'm sure that when the developers get things more settled with the major re-write FF is going through, they will beef up the handling of edge cases and other perennial issues like printing.

jscher2000 said

Hi battles_atlas, Firefox stores open tabs to a second file during your session to provide protection against corruption of the main file. Sync has the option to sync open tabs. Does Firefox need to do more? Hard to say. You can use add-ons to provide additional storage. Please refer to my reply from November 4th about that.

Thanks yes I've started trying one of the addons you suggested, not clear to me yet if it auto saves or needs me to manually do it, but either way hopefully that will provide some protection.

crankygoat said

I'm sure that when the developers get things more settled with the major re-write FF is going through, they will beef up the handling of edge cases and other perennial issues like printing.

It's certainly an odd one - I don't have any issues with any other programme, and everything else recovers fine with Firefox. Hopefully just be sorted over time as you say.