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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad I already made the switch to FireFox. I only use Chrome to access Google apps, because for some strange reason they work a lot better in Chrome...

The only thing I miss is a Session Buddy equivalent. When my computer crashes, it's nice to be able to restore all my tabs and windows, and also it's nice to be able to close a bunch of windows when I travel and then go back to my tab state from three weeks ago.

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Firefox has session restore, which also works when the browser is closed abruptly. Is it now working for you?

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it just restores some of the tabs and windows. It's really inconsistent.

Also it lacks the granularity of session buddy, which has a list of every tab and window configuration I've ever had.

What OS? I use this all the time, I don't think I have ever had a problem.

I do use nightly though. I have like 100 tabs open, and I would know if I was missing any of them. I need them all. ALL OF THEM.

Nightly FireFox on the latest beta MacOS.

You should try reporting a bug. Session Restore always works for me, and I'm on Nightly!

I can't replicate it so I can't report it. :( It works like 95% of the time, but that 5% is just really irritating.

Maybe wrap Firefox startup in a shell script that backs up your profile data before starting the browser, and then when the problem occurs send a bug report and work with the developers to give them the information they might need.

These bugs suck for everyone and I'm sure Mozilla developers would appreciate any help they can get to track it down.

Have you tried hitting Ctrl+Shift+N to restore the previously closed windows?

These will behave differently: (1) "Quitting" Firefox will multiple windows open. (2) Using your WM to close both Firefox windows. The latter will cause only the last-closed window to be restored, but you can pop the others off the stack too with Ctrl+Shift+N.

I tried that. I exhausted the stack and not all the windows were there.

Just so you don't feel crazy, I've had this happen multiple times as well (on both Linux and Windows).

In fact, it's one of the larger reasons (tabs constantly crashing is the largest one atm) I leave Firefox for side jobs instead of being relied upon as my main browser.

That's quite odd, I have to say FF restore has always been rock solid for me, use it everyday.

Hm, I had session restore fail maybe every 3 years or so.

For more features, I'd recommend looking at either the Container feature, that might be able to help, or otherwise third-party extensions - maybe another commenter has a recommendation, since there's a giant number of tab management extensions, and it's hard to tell which ones do what perfectly.

Firefox has this if you are using a Firefox account at least.

If you search around a bit in the sidebar menu you’ll find a list of all the open and previously open tabs on any of your PC’s. Including ability to restore all of them at once.

Not sure if it’s quite the same thing.

I use a Firefox addon called Session Boss. It might be what you're looking for.

Yes! Thank you! I don't know why my searching failed to find this, but it is in fact exactly what I was looking for. If this were Reddit I'd give you Gold. You're my hero.

Former Session Buddy user. I'm using Session Sync and it's pretty neat. I think Session Buddy UI is still better and Session Sync needs some improvements (such as selecting multiple tabs in a session simultaneously). However, once I got used to it, I didn't miss it at all.

In addition, I like the integration with Firefox Bookmarks. It creates a folder "Session Sync" and stores sessions as sub-folders. So, if anything happens, I still have them as simple, curated bookmarks.

> I only use Chrome to access Google apps, because for some strange reason they work a lot better in Chrome...

DOS 2.1 ain't done until Lotus won't run

You just gave me flashbacks to when I upgraded from DOS 2.0 to 2.1...

There's also Tab Session Manager, which I've been using with great success for hundreds of years!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...

I tried that one but it didn't handle containers.

This impacts you if you're on FF too... if this works and Google is able to monetize Chrome more directly than FF then FF is going to have less development resources.

It's not exactly sessions, but you can bookmark all open tabs (perhaps into a folder called sessions/worktrip_boston), and then later "open all as tabs" using that folder.

I find this useful when researching a particular thing, and wanting to save the resources for later. Sorry I can't remember the exact menu items, as I'm on Firefox mobile and it doesn't do it.

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