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

Restored tabs from previous session appear empty (New Tab; about:blank)

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
  • 2 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

I've set my Mozilla Firefox to restore my previous session every time I open the browser. Today all of a sudden more than half of my tabs appear as New Tab and they are empty (about:blank) even though it was fine the last time I accessed them several hours ago.

The solution of switching sessionstore backups file won't quite work here because the most recent one is about a week old.

I installed Session Manager add-on but it loads and reads session the same with all the lost tabs as about:blank, even the previous.js session file. (Though I probably made a mistake that I closed Firefox when it first appeared like that, then closed it, then reopened and closed again in hope that it was just a glitch and the browser would normally display all the tabs once again because I've never experienced specifically this kind of issue before, so probably the original previous.js file got replaced by the system the next time I reopened browser with all the lost tabs).

I also tried Web-developed Scratchpad tool with the script but it also doesn't display the links or any information of those "New Tabs", only like this: "Not available about:blank

^ window 1 tab 146 entries 11"

Lastly I renamed previous.js file to .txt file and all the lost tabs (that show up as empty New Tabs now) appear with their specific number and data but basically the line is like this: {"entries":[{"url":"about:blank","charset":"","ID":3579944675,"docshellID":149,"docIdentifier":410,"persist":false}],"lastAccessed":1481047073742,"hidden":false,"attributes":{},"userContextId":0,"index":1,"userTypedValue":"","userTypedClear":0,"image":""}

What should I do, how can I fix this issue?

I've set my Mozilla Firefox to restore my previous session every time I open the browser. Today all of a sudden more than half of my tabs appear as New Tab and they are empty (about:blank) even though it was fine the last time I accessed them several hours ago. The solution of switching sessionstore backups file won't quite work here because the most recent one is about a week old. I installed Session Manager add-on but it loads and reads session the same with all the lost tabs as about:blank, even the previous.js session file. (Though I probably made a mistake that I closed Firefox when it first appeared like that, then closed it, then reopened and closed again in hope that it was just a glitch and the browser would normally display all the tabs once again because I've never experienced specifically this kind of issue before, so probably the original previous.js file got replaced by the system the next time I reopened browser with all the lost tabs). I also tried Web-developed Scratchpad tool with the script but it also doesn't display the links or any information of those "New Tabs", only like this: "Not available about:blank ^ window 1 tab 146 entries 11" Lastly I renamed previous.js file to .txt file and all the lost tabs (that show up as empty New Tabs now) appear with their specific number and data but basically the line is like this: {"entries":[{"url":"about:blank","charset":"","ID":3579944675,"docshellID":149,"docIdentifier":410,"persist":false}],"lastAccessed":1481047073742,"hidden":false,"attributes":{},"userContextId":0,"index":1,"userTypedValue":"","userTypedClear":0,"image":""} What should I do, how can I fix this issue?

All Replies (1)

more options

If you do not have any backups of a sessionstore file then you are out-of-luck.

You can check in Windows Explorer if there is a previous version of the sessionstore.js file available.