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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could just visit about:tabs and see a plain text listing, one URL per line, of all the tabs I have open.

No esoteric attack vectors, no major new features or integrations, just a quick and easy way for any user regardless of technical ability to dump their tabs before they update firefox or reboot their system ...

... since everyone has been burned by a FF restart that, for unknown reasons, fails to restore tabs even when configured properly to do so.

As it stands, you need to dig several directories deep into /Library (or whatever, depending on your OS) and then use JSON tools to export ... I've already lost most people.

FWIW, rsync.net has an outstanding $1500 bounty for this feature[1]. Consider this an inflation adjusted bump to $2500.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24524923

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I have a extension that does that almost pretty identically to what you are looking for... it does list out every page you have but doesn't list the url. there is an unreleased version that I use that has a tab dumping to json that I use for just that session restore reason.

Maybe I'll finish the updated version and release it soon.

feel free to check it out: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

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

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

Firefox's session is stored entirely within sessionstore.jsonlz4 in the profile folder (and backups, or while running, in sessionstore-backups) -- locate using about:profiles. It's a nonstandard lz4 container but you can find implementations, e.g. lz4json/lz4jsoncat in some package managers.

Once decompressed you have json lists of windows of tabs, including recently closed; for every tab, urls and titles of each entry in per-tab history, base64ed favicon, last selected time, and various less useful data (some still incomprehensible -- binary serialized or cache keys?). Cookies and data from extensions like treestyletabs are in there too.

OTOH... is there a currently working deserializer for Chrome's session files?

Indeed! Dumping this recovery.jsonlz4 file on the command line is how I inspect and archive all my tabs and windows. You can do this on remote systems, too, and Firefox does not need to be running.

The scripts I use to do this can be found here:

https://github.com/madphilosopher/dump_firefox_session

> ... since everyone has been burned by a FF restart that, for unknown reasons, fails to restore tabs even when configured properly to do so.

I've actually had this several times with Chrome, but never with Firefox. The major point of me moving to FF actually was when Chrome lost 50 Tabs once again.

Firefox reliably remembers my tabs, but never my pinned tabs-- which, of course, are the ones that I actually want to be preserved across restarts. In my dream world, pinned tabs persist forever, and are even accessible across devices, perhaps sorted into separate containers à la Sideberry.

I just use Tree Tabs ability to export the entire sessions tabs.

My work laptop has around 30MB of old Tree Tabs exports I haven't gotten around to deleting.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/

With Sidebery (modern alternative to TST), the tab tree is automatically backed up every $time_interval.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/sidebery/

I built [1] for the reason to save and restore the browsing tabs. It has export and import sessions feature as a by product. [2] also has a test list mode on tabs.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-boss/

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tip-tab/

Thanks - I will look at these.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabhunter/

Makes it simple to select all tabs and copy paste as url or url + title

It's also snappy for filtering and jumping to tabs especially when using the hotkey, I've used it for years with regularly over 5k tabs.

> wish I could just visit about:tabs and see a plain text listing, one URL per line, of all the tabs I have open.

Tablist[1] does this

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tablist/

Great takedown in the linked thread. jhardy54 snarks that the author just needs to open a patch. When rsync presses, it turns out jhardy54's own patches have been completely neglected by the maintainers and he hasn't been able to merge them in.

Onetab does it, and lets you export your links as a text file as well.

about:discards is almost this. (Chromium desktop)

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