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Tabs Recovery

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  • Last reply by Osvetnik

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Hi, this isn't quite a tab recovery as the session hasn't ended, it just won't display the window. But it's in private browsing so I don't want to close the window since I understand that nothing will be saved from that session. But is there somewhere I can access a list of tabs while the session still exists? I'd hate to lose them all.

Hi, this isn't quite a tab recovery as the session hasn't ended, it just won't display the window. But it's in private browsing so I don't want to close the window since I understand that nothing will be saved from that session. But is there somewhere I can access a list of tabs while the session still exists? I'd hate to lose them all.

Chosen solution

You can try to use the Browser Console to save the current session data.

Note that you need to enable the command prompt.


/* Session data - Get/Set State */
ssj = SessionStore.getBrowserState(); // get Current Session State
ssj = prompt("Copy Current Session State\n\nPaste New Session State: press ESC or click Cancel to abort", ssj||"");
if(ssj){SessionStore.setBrowserState(ssj)}

You can paste the content in a file and possibly check this file via this tool.

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All Replies (8)

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Chosen Solution

You can try to use the Browser Console to save the current session data.

Note that you need to enable the command prompt.


/* Session data - Get/Set State */
ssj = SessionStore.getBrowserState(); // get Current Session State
ssj = prompt("Copy Current Session State\n\nPaste New Session State: press ESC or click Cancel to abort", ssj||"");
if(ssj){SessionStore.setBrowserState(ssj)}

You can paste the content in a file and possibly check this file via this tool.

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Alright I will try that, but I also have a "normal" session open. For some reason that works fine but the private window won't display. If I access the browser console will it show both sessions? How would I distinguish between them?

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Maybe because I have a lot of tabs open, my Firefox has trouble showing the session in the Prompt dialog. I adapted cor-el's script to save to disk:

https://gist.github.com/jscher2000/d7c77f90bde6f37f526faa56c6a2b19e

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If you use the Browser Console then you get tabs from all open windows, regular and private browsing (isPrivate key), unlike sessionstore.jsonlz4 that only saves the tabs in regular windows. I don't know how the scrounger tool deals with PB mode tabs.

See also:

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cor-el said

I don't know how the scrounger tool deals with PB mode tabs.

If private windows are found in the JSON data, the window is listed with (Private) next to the number. But as you point out, that would only be in data pulled through the Browser Console and not in Firefox's standard files.

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Alright I got a little distracted but I finally got around to trying this, and it's telling me when I enter the command prompt that sessionstore is not defined.

I tried jscher2000's command prompt and it gave me a different error, that said:

Uncaught SyntaxError: expected expression, got '*'

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Make sure you are testing in the Browser Console popup window (Ctrl+Shift+j) and not in the tab-specific Web Console.

For my script, did you paste starting from line 1 ? You actually can omit lines 1-11 and start with line 12. (But don't start with any other lines.)

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Okay yeah that's what it was, I was using the web console. I just got it to work I'm very relieved, thanks for all the help you two you saved a lot of stuff I was working on.