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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

Even better just disable session restore entirely - Browser.sessionstore.enabled - Since Firefox 3.5 this preference is superseded with setting browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo and browser.sessionstore.max_windows_undo to 0.

As I understand this feature is there so if the browser crashes it can restore your windows and tabs - I don't remember having a browser crash on me since the demise of Flash.

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> I don't remember having a browser crash on me since the demise of Flash.

Just try browsing reddit with the RES extension or streaming heavy data for a few seconds (like a server side PDF processor that takes more than 30 seconds to finish, it's the same old behavior of blocking JS dialogs from years ago, white screen of death). When I'm using a iGPU (512MB) and I open some heavy images in sequence the browser crashes after a certain amount of time but this time it freezes the entire computer for a few seconds, so I suspect it's OOM (iGPU). I never bothered looking for a solution, nowadays I don't even care when my browser ocasionally crashes. My overall desktop (software) experience gets worse every year so I have gone used to it.

But Firefox still is my favorite browser and I wouldn't trade it for anything else!

> RES extension or streaming heavy data

Yeah that's the difference - I only use few well known extensions like uBlock Origin, Self Destructing Cookies, Lastpass and Decentraleyes. No trouble with any PDFs either. Anyway this is getting off track with the crashes or not - my point was even if it crashes it is no big deal if you can't restore - just reopen will work in most cases.

> I only use few well known extensions

RES is more well known (in terms of number of downloads/users) than 50% of your listed extensions, for the record.

Replace Browser Crash with: Accidentally pressing Ctrl-w

And yes, there are browser crashes without Flash

Hmm I really haven't had FF or Chrome crash on me since a long time - I do browse a lot. I can't be that lucky. I am not saying it doesn't happen - I am saying it's so infrequent that it's just better to deal with it when it happens instead of killing your SSD with constant writes of 15GB per day. Most people don't do anything that needs to be recovered by a crashed browser.

I don't remember the last time Chrome crashed. Rarely one tab crashes (usually due to Adobe Flash).

Who really cares about restoring browser state? Maybe I lose part of an HN or Facebook post I'd been writing, but that's it. The feature should be opt-in, IMHO.

I certainly care about it, although it's possible that my 50-odd browser tabs would be considered "clutter" by other people.

I stopped using Edge because it only saves your tab session if you turn off the PC, not if you quit the browser.

Mind you, for a while I ran Firefox using a RAMdisc for the profile simply because all that flushing makes a big negative impact on PC performance.

You're in good shape. I'm at 337 tabs. ;-)

I made a simple firefox/chrome extension for people like you and me that horde tabs. You might find it useful to find tabs and quickly navigate to them by clicking on the link in the list. It's free and open source. The github page has a gif showing usage.

Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...

Firefox Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/

source code: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

Let me know if you find it useful or have any suggestions.

Your chrome link is broken.

Anyway I used an extension like this for awhile, called session buddy. But now I just use control+D and bookmark all my tabs. Then you get bookmark syncing, and you can save your tabs when you export bookmarks, or wget them to have a local archive, etc. It's just more convenient, and one less extension I have to worry about stealing my personal information or bugging and corrupting my data.

That's fair and the extension is not for everyone. It's not really meant for saving sessions or anything like that it's more for finding lost tabs in a sea of windows like I typically have. This is more for tabs that are not worth saving to bookmarks but that you have open for a long time as a transient bookmark.

FWIW, Mozilla looks at all extensions before fully approving them and the app is fully open source and fairly easily vetted if people are worried about that sort of thing.

Thanks for the feedback!

this is brilliant. P.S. your chrome link is broken.

On suggestion - please give a button to save all of this as a "session" or something. I'm a tab hoarder and sometimes I just want to dump it somewhere and start afresh.

Please help me !

Thanks! the link is fixed now... I actually did just this thing the other day but didn't know if other people would want it. I will update the addon with it.

if you could do one more thing - allow me to search within the "sessions". that would be awesome (search should work both on domain and title)

thanks!

I had about ~250 tabs and i closed them now. Bookmarked before. This "feature" of FF is rly cucking. I have tons of GB written to my SSD without any benefit (i not a "safety critical user"). And the worst thing is, all of this data was written into 40 GB of SSD space.

this session restore feature, lets just save the urls in a list. that data structure cant be GB of GB right! ;) I think thats enough for the, lets say, typical FF user.

Now, that i know about this issue, i will bring down my tab usage to no more than 10 tabs.

I also keep 50-100 tabs open at all times. How do you manage your tabs?

Hadn't thought about it until now, but this feature may be why I don't see "I wrote you a long message but accidentally closed the tab / hit the back button / my computer crashed and I lost it, so here's the highlights I remember" emails from friends and family anymore. I would much rather discover this caveat and opt out than expect my grandmother to know it's even possible to opt in.

At this point, isn't that responsiblity larged handled by server-based autosave? GMail / Google Docs being the big ones, I assume FB and other social networking sites do the same.

Also, couldn't this session-restore feature be triggered for this specific tab _after_ I've started to type text in a box?

Yeah, if you only write on Fb or HN I see why you're not missing nothing

I really care about it. I take advantage of it everyday. I close tabs and use ctrl+shift+t to reopen them, I reopen my browsers previous state after closing it, and after computer crashes I don't have to worry about losing any of my precious tabs.

Why should it save the whole page when it only needs to remember the URL? At most, maybe also any form data you have entered. Small enough to keep thousands of pages in memory.

And what if the server sends something different back when you visit the URL again?

The internet allows it to do that.

The job of a browser is to view the internet. Not to cache it.

It needs to save enough state to give you the same view.

Go disable your browser cache and try browsing the internet for a while and tell me if you really believe that.

It doesn't save the whole page. Just the url, scrolling position, form data and session cookies. If you're browsing with 500 tabs, most of which contain nested frames, including Facebook "Like" icons and the like, that's actually quite a lot.

Ctrl-W is not that bad, but I sometimes want to close tab by Ctrl-W but instead hit Ctrl-Q...

I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cmd-q-catcher... to force me to hit it twice to actually quit. Dunno if it works on platforms besides Mac though.

Thanks, I do that all the time. Installed.

Or learn Dvorak. The Q and W are pretty far apart.

You're right. One second thought, learning Dvorak is the easier solution.

Ah that's what I mean

I've been setting browser.showQuitWarning to true for years to stop ^Q from killing the browser and with it my state.

Could have sworn that has crap all effect if you also have Firefox save your tabs on quit.

Try this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-ctrl-...

Other things than a browser crash can cause the browser to unexpectedly quit. For example, a battery dying, or the power going out.

Right but that doesn't happen quite often either. Also if it does how important is restoring the tabs and windows? Probably not to a lot of people other than serious creators that use a web editor of some sort that'll lose work if the browser disappears. Even then it is flaky to rely on something like this. Much better to have periodic backups of whatever you're doing.

You say "doesn't happen quite often", which I'm assuming means something like "doesn't happen quite often to me". But if you consider hundreds of millions of users using Firefox every day, then even a relatively rare event is happening to multiple users every single day. It is absolutely worth it to them that Firefox does its best to preserve their data.

You have a point, but power outages are very correlated.

Sad that the crash feature (which I don't particularly like or use) is directly tied to the undo close tab feature (which I do).

I don't like the anxiety of opening Firefox in front of someone, and wondering if my previous tabs will pop up.

It happens rarely to me, but it sometimes does. Also, your machine can crash, someone can trip over a power line, ...

At work, I routinely have something like 30-40 tabs open, if my browser can restore the session after a crash, that is very valuable to me.

I actually find that webGL-heavy sites like Google Maps are quite good at crashing FF.

Yep, StreetView in particular. And don't get me started on Shadertoy, which seems to make "crashing FF" its mission statement.

I need to regularly kill firefox. I just did in fact. It didn't technically crash, but it becomes totally non-responsive for seconds at a time. Maybe it is a misbehaving plugin and not ff, but the effect is the same.

It'll also cover OS crashes or power failures. Agreed that those aren't very common either.

I haven't had a browser crash for a while, but fairly routinely Windows will reboot itself to apply an update. (Once every other month, at least)

Thanks for the tip.

I'll see if it has any affect on my laptop's battery life and fan usage.

It happens relatively often for me, maybe 1-2 times a month. No crazy extensions.

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