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I want to restore my tabs that closed unexpectedly about a week ago. I am also trying to install an extension to help me with this in the future.

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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I'm extremely frustrated with firefox at this point for not being able to do something very simple which google chrome has. I want to organize my tabs into groups so that the next time my tabs close unexpectedly, I can open all of the ones from that group. I naturally organize them right now into windows and I minimize the window if I'm not using the tabs in that window. However, my new laptop cannot handle having more than 3 windows with 5 tabs open at a time. Last week, I was on a video call and firefox closed all of my windows that I had organized my tabs into. Once I was able to reboot firefox, I could not click "restore session" because I needed to get on the video call. Then the "restore session" button was lost. Many of the tabs I haven't touched for a few weeks, even though they were all organized together, I can't find them in my history together because I wasn't using them all on the same day and some of them were sitting unused but on a digital to do list within that window. I've tried every single tab organizer that is "recommended" on the firefox extensions and they all suck. I don't understand why they automatically hide my tab groups and then I can't open them again, I don't understand why I need to duplicate a tab to mark it in a certain container, it just feels like none of these are simple and none of them will do what I want them to. I want to speak to a real person. I need help. I don't think I can use firefox anymore. Why is there no help people here.

I'm extremely frustrated with firefox at this point for not being able to do something very simple which google chrome has. I want to organize my tabs into groups so that the next time my tabs close unexpectedly, I can open all of the ones from that group. I naturally organize them right now into windows and I minimize the window if I'm not using the tabs in that window. However, my new laptop cannot handle having more than 3 windows with 5 tabs open at a time. Last week, I was on a video call and firefox closed all of my windows that I had organized my tabs into. Once I was able to reboot firefox, I could not click "restore session" because I needed to get on the video call. Then the "restore session" button was lost. Many of the tabs I haven't touched for a few weeks, even though they were all organized together, I can't find them in my history together because I wasn't using them all on the same day and some of them were sitting unused but on a digital to do list within that window. I've tried every single tab organizer that is "recommended" on the firefox extensions and they all suck. I don't understand why they automatically hide my tab groups and then I can't open them again, I don't understand why I need to duplicate a tab to mark it in a certain container, it just feels like none of these are simple and none of them will do what I want them to. I want to speak to a real person. I need help. I don't think I can use firefox anymore. Why is there no help people here.

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Backup the session files in the sessionstore-backups folder in the Firefox profile folder to make sure not to lose possible important session data. Do NOT close Firefox when Firefox is already running.

You will normally find these files in the sessionstore-backups folder:

  • previous.jsonlz4 (cleanBackup: copy of sessionstore.jsonlz4 from previous session that was loaded successfully)
  • recovery.jsonlz4 (latest version of sessionstore.jsonlz4 written during runtime)
  • recovery.baklz4 (previous version of sessionstore.jsonlz4 written during runtime)
  • upgrade.jsonlz4-<build_id> (backup created during an upgrade of Firefox)

You can copy a file from the sessionstore-backups folder to the main profile and rename the file to sessionstore.jsonlz4 to replace the current file with Firefox closed.

  • make sure to backup the current sessionstore.jsonlz4

You can try to restore a recent upgrade.jsonlz4-<build_id> when available.

You can look at this tool to inspect a compressed jsonlz4 sessionstore file. This tool works locally, no uploading done.