This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Can't restore tabs using sessionstore.js from previous session

  • 2 cavab
  • 17 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

Occasionally in the past I've lost my tabs when restarting Firefox. I've been able to solve this by copying an old version of sessionrestore.js (which FF made automatically - thank you!) over the current one. However, today this does not seem to work. Unclear if this has anything to do with the recent FF update that apparently changed my look and feel (unless one of the kids changed that, though this is my personal FF profile).

With FF shut down, I initially copied over the latest sessionrestore.js then restarted. It just came up with one tab on my home page. I then used windows file restore to a replace with an older previous version of sessionstore.js. I checked that this file is a lot bigger than the current one. However, again starting FF just displayed one tab on my home page. Why won't it restore tabs from an old session?

FYI I did navigate to a page, restart FF and verify that it is restoring my open tabs on restart.

Occasionally in the past I've lost my tabs when restarting Firefox. I've been able to solve this by copying an old version of sessionrestore.js (which FF made automatically - thank you!) over the current one. However, today this does not seem to work. Unclear if this has anything to do with the recent FF update that apparently changed my look and feel (unless one of the kids changed that, though this is my personal FF profile). With FF shut down, I initially copied over the latest sessionrestore.js then restarted. It just came up with one tab on my home page. I then used windows file restore to a replace with an older previous version of sessionstore.js. I checked that this file is a lot bigger than the current one. However, again starting FF just displayed one tab on my home page. Why won't it restore tabs from an old session? FYI I did navigate to a page, restart FF and verify that it is restoring my open tabs on restart.

All Replies (2)

more options

Firefox's built in session manager is crap, use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-manager/

Youll save yourself a thousand headaches.

more options

Did you look for "History > Recently Closed Tabs/Windows"

You can check browser.sessionstore.* prefs including browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash on the about:config page and reset browser.sessionstore prefs that are user set (bold) via the right-click context menu to the default value to make sure that Session Restore is enabled and working properly.

Also check that you aren't using "Clear history when Firefox closes" to clear data like the history.

If the sessionstore.js isn't too big then try to validate the file.