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Recently Closed Tabs cleared after accidently opening a new session.

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After a power failure, I launched FireFox and got the "emabrrassing" message, deselected the tab I was reading when the power failed. Then I accidently clicked the new session button instead of the restore button. After that, recently closed tabs under history was grayed out.

Although I was able to copy sessionstore.bak to sessionstore.js and get back the tabs, I think that the recently closed tabs list should have had those tabs listed in it.

FireFox 21 on Debian stable.

After a power failure, I launched FireFox and got the "emabrrassing" message, deselected the tab I was reading when the power failed. Then I accidently clicked the new session button instead of the restore button. After that, recently closed tabs under history was grayed out. Although I was able to copy sessionstore.bak to sessionstore.js and get back the tabs, I think that the recently closed tabs list should have had those tabs listed in it. FireFox 21 on Debian stable.

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Recently closed tabs shows tabs closed in the current session. You would first have to restore the previous session to see tabs closed in the session.

Wasn't it possible to restore the previous session (History > Restore Previous Session)?

When you start Firefox then the sessionstore.js file from the previous session is copied to sessionstore.bak and a new empty sessionstore.js is created for the current session, so you do not have direct access to windows and tabs from the previous session that has crashed in your case and that would now be stored in the sessionstore.bak file.

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Restore Previous Session was also grayed out.

Basically FF "forgot" the previous session when I accidently clicked the new session button when I meant to click the restore button.

I was able to restore it by copying sessionstore.bak to sessionstore.js

A less technical user would have had more trouble doing this than I did. I think this could be made less hard.