When a website erases your text you can use this trick to recover it | Hacker News Reader

When a website erases your text you can use this trick to recover it

merveilles.town

Or if you’re comfortable with extensions, use “Form History Control” [1] to save all your form inputs and to restore or export them.

Before XUL extensions were removed in Firefox, the “Lazarus: Form Recovery” [2] extension to save form data was one of my “must haves” with Firefox.

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

[2]: https://github.com/lazarus-recovery/lazarus_addon

I use the Textarea Cache extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/textarea-cach...

If you're using a reasonably recent Firefox, it may use separate renderer processes, in which case you'll need to find the PID corresponding to the renderer process that was responsible for that website (and hope it hasn't died in the meantime).

Browsers should provide text input recovery, at least short term. Even a 15-minute storage would be enough for the most common use-cases.

For example, if I attempt to submit a form, but the website errors out, I should be able to reload the page, right-click the input, and click something like “Recover input” in the context menu.

I like the "formsave" extension on firefox for this!

Safari kind of does, most of the time, with back undo-close tab, though I agree it must be 100% reliable for peace of mind to set in.

Pretty cool, I remember seeing Marcan toot about this trick a number of months ago. https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109918006697541955

This problem was re-introduced by various of shitty SPA practices.

It's a solved problem in the good o' days with simple HTML forms.

> It's a solved problem in the good o' days with simple HTML forms.

Not completely. Here on HN (which is not a SPA) if I upvote someones comment while I'm responding to it, I lose my response.

Now I know I can hit the back button and recover it (in Chrome on OSX at least), but I imagine a lot of people don't

> Here on HN (which is not a SPA) if I upvote someones comment while I'm responding to it, I lose my response.

That only happens if you disable JavaScript and voting has to be done through an href navigation. Otherwise HN constructs an Image with the voting URL as src, so there's no navigation and you don't lose anything.

It does lose it for me if I click on the reply link[0] and start typing. It works just as you say if I'm on the post itself[1] by clicking on the timestamp, and typing in the pre-existing reply box.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=37400631&goto=item%3Fi...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37400631

Back in the 2.0.x Linux kernel days, I used to regularly recover lost Netscape session state (and comments) by simply dumping /proc/<pid>/mem

Or, if the browser had already died, system memory (/proc/mem if ... memory ... serves). That entry no longer exists and I may be misremembering.

At some point I believe that no longer worked. Though browser stability's also improved somewhat.

Alternate solution:

Make your own fork of Chromium or Firefox, where all keyboard input is logged to an encrypted file on disk as you type. If something you wrote in a text input disappears before you got to submit it, you can then find it in your encrypted file on disk.

There are also browser extensions that do this (minus the encrypted part).

I tried to search for that but for Firefox all three results I could immediately find were ages old so I am not sure they still work.

Also, it’s important to write to disk very often for this purpose. And the encryption is important.

And given that you are adding something that is in effect a keylogger and trusting it with all your inputs, I would not want just any random third party add on author to be in charge of that.

An easier way to do this is a small X utility that logs keystrokes, but only if the window title contains Firefox. You can write such a utility faster than you can compile a browser.

My laptop runs macOS. On macOS it's a bit annoying because you have to use accessibility frameworks for that kind of things I think.

I think over time it might potentially be easier to maintain a keylogger on top of a forked web browser, than to maintain a system level keylogger on macOS, when all I am interested is the keystrokes I type in the browser.

I know this is a bit offtopic but maybe someone can help me...

since *always* when i try to access https://merveilles.town/ the server gives me an error (the console shows an error 500 and site crashes there); it happens to me both from pc and mobile, both under wifi and cable and 4g... since that mastodon instance is the home of the 100 rabbits dudes, i'm so sorry i can't view their posts :(

Man, I wish I had known this in regards to Tumblr posts a decade ago. I accidentally hit ctrl-R when I had been writing a post for about an hour, and lost all my writing.

Since that time, I always write my stuff locally in Neovim and just copypaste into the editor.

Anyone mind translating this for a gdb noob?

When I try:

> sudo gdb 678

> 678: No such file or directory.

Docs say maybe the -p flag?

> sudo gdb -p

> Attaching to process 678

> Unable to find Mach task port for process-id 678: (os/kern) failure (0x5).

(Yes, I could probably read and understand docs, but, that takes effort)

https://archive.ph/JqMOt

Dumb clickbait-esque title, alternative: how to dump memory from your browser to (potentially) recover lost text from filled-in forms.

I thought "website erases your text" meant like websites deleting your submissions.

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