Comment by pleasecalllater | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pleasecalllater | Hacker News Reader

pleasecalllater

This one will be emotional as this destroyed some of my today's work.

F you Mozilla. I lost all my tabs opened in other containers. The containers don't work too, so I cannot reopen them.

This bug has been known for 3 years, and you did nothing to fix it. You get so much money, and what you do is basically provide a pathetic software (thunderbird) and a nice browser (which you just stopped from working) and you show me banners asking for more money.

You should be ashamed. 3 years. And no, I'm not going to listen things like "this is open source, you are free to fix it". I will just go and switch to another browser. I need a browser which works, not a one which suddenly decides that my stuff should be broken because all the developers and managers have been ignoring a critical issue for a couple of years.

:( I know, this will be flagged, and removed. I don't care, I just need to get all my tabs in containers back. I have never thought that a browser can just close my tabs because a certificate expired.

I lose all tabs occasionally. Browsers aren't perfect, it does happen after a weird crash, or something. It's exceedingly rare, like maybe twice a year.

With that said, I've always considered tabs to be volatile state. Browsers make their best effort to e.g. restore the previous session after a crash, but if you want non-volatile browser state, you should use bookmarks.

True. However, this time they are closed because the world changed (due to someone ignoring a bug and a certificate expiration date).

Btw, I haven't got any Fx crash for the last 3 or 4 years.

I hope an ignorant programmer/manager won't try removing my bookmarks because they lead to a page with an expired certificate.

Eh, for me only that often if you include stuff caused by a dumb user (aka me). And even then I always got them back one way or another. Usually from %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profile]\sessionstore-backups (thankfully there's usually a recent copy, since I'm on a test version) or last resort from backups.

Except I specifically use an extension to ensure tab state isn't volatile (Tab Session Manager, backed up with export tabs urls & a custom script), since I don't want to bookmark 35 pages for a current project, I just want to save them to a named session and have everything avaliable when I return to the project.

I agree that tabs are volatile, although I really wish they weren't. I'm having flashbacks to the quantum switch and having to change most of my extensions. I'd consider switching, but I really don't care for the chromium monoculture that's developing.

It's not just tabs, but for many users the containers themselves are gone - as well as their cookies and other associated assumed-to-be-non-ephemeral state.

Yep. I just got hit by the bug. Enabled studies, got the fix, but all my configured containers are gone. NOT happy right now.

Every browser I used has managed to lose my open tabs, chrome did it most frequently and with no obvious way to restore them. Hurts every time, but the only actual answer you will not be happy to hear is you shouldn't depend on browser saving your current open tabs, that's just asking for trouble.

Ironically, I've had excellent luck with a Firefox extension (tab session manager). I've had crashes which lost tabs, normally from me being an idiot, but it's done an excellent job preserving sessions automatically.

Hey, just FYI, there are some good solutions in this thread to get your problem fixed ASAP.

This one should work. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19827302

No. JUST A HUGE NOOOO.

My reply is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828472

We’re literally in this mess because Firefox requires digital signatures on this kind of thing, please don’t make FUD posts.

This is much better than disabling the very same safe guard, signature checking, that prevents you from running arbitrary code in the first place.

How is this better then enabling studies, a setting that is already part of Firefox? Installing add-ons from random sources can be risky.

But anyways, I'm not sure why, but the addons on my main computer remained enabled... unlike my 2 other computers.

It's cryptographically signed by Mozilla. The signature is much more important than the source.

I clicked that link and it displayed a puzzle piece with a one-way/no-entry symbol (https://i.stack.imgur.com/eVpMr.png)... not sure how I can know that this was signed by Mozilla, a company that I trust less every year

The UI doesn't tell you, unfortunately. You would have to verify it out of band. But the browser already forces the verification, which you can verify by noticing all your add-ons are literally disabled because the signature checking is failing on them.

AFAIK the reason the UI is scary is primarily because it is from an era when add-ons were much more dangerous, and when they were not required to be centrally signed. Neither is true anymore afaik.

Firefox keeps session backups in the profile folder. You might be able to recover your open tabs with it. I've been in a similar situation with tab groups and managed to recover all of them, though I don't remember exactly how.

previous.jsonlz4 and upgrade.jsonlz4-datenumbers

They will almost certainly work to get tabs back when copied over the profile's sessionstore.jsonlz4

If something has gone really wrong then the tab URLs can be extracted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com