404 Tech Support

Session Manager extension: Prevent Data Loss in Firefox

If you’ve ever been writing up a long e-mail, forum post, or anything else that doesn’t save automatically in your browser and had Firefox crash or your computer shut down, you know how infuriating it can be to lose the time and words that you’ve already written.

While Firefox crashes are far and few between, it’s better to be safe than sorry when it comes to these things. Particularly if you’re multitasking and using other tabs while your document lingers open this extension is of even greater importance. Stumbling upon a bad flash (.swf) file or any number of other things that initiates a Firefox crash just spells doom as you can’t even switch back to your important tab and copy the information out of there.

The Session Manager extension keeps the data in forms backed up meaning your text is safe. This is something that Tab Mix Plus’s session restore feature does not do, as I painfully found out this morning. Session Manager is also a lot more customizable than Firefox 3’s built-in Crash restore.

To verify that the information in a form, you can see the info under your Firefox profile (%appdata%MozillaFirefoxProfiles[profilename]) in a file called sessionstore.js. Just open this up in a text editor and you can see all your data. If worst came to worse, with a little formatting, you could pull your data out with minimal loss.

One cool feature of Session Manager is that it can import saved sessions from Tab Mix Plus.

Install Session Manager for Firefox.

After installing, be sure to test out your settings that it is storing your form data and restoring it!