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All tabs are blank after session restore

  • 2 replies
  • 18 have this problem
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  • Last reply by mazinger

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After clicking on a link to a page that opened in a new tab, all of the tabs in my browser window stopped working properly (i.e. I couldn't close them, make new tabs, or go to a previous page), and restoring my session turned them into "new tabs" with no way of accessing their previous content (the number of tabs is the same). See attached image for reference, the Firefox tab is the only one made after the session restore. The browser thinks it restored the session properly, as the "restore previous session" option is greyed out. Restoring a backup version of my profile folder to one from two days ago just reverts the saved history, notably, the "recently closed tabs" list was not reverted to the backup version and shows tabs that I closed earlier today. These tabs function normally.

After clicking on a link to a page that opened in a new tab, all of the tabs in my browser window stopped working properly (i.e. I couldn't close them, make new tabs, or go to a previous page), and restoring my session turned them into "new tabs" with no way of accessing their previous content (the number of tabs is the same). See attached image for reference, the Firefox tab is the only one made after the session restore. The browser thinks it restored the session properly, as the "restore previous session" option is greyed out. Restoring a backup version of my profile folder to one from two days ago just reverts the saved history, notably, the "recently closed tabs" list was not reverted to the backup version and shows tabs that I closed earlier today. These tabs function normally.

Chosen solution

You can backup the session files in the sessionstore-backups folder in the Firefox Profile Folder to make sure not to lose possible important session data.

previous.js (cleanBackup: copy of sessionstore.js from previous session that was loaded successfully)
recovery.js (latest version of the sessionstore written during runtime)
recovery.bak (previous version of the sessionstore written during runtime)
upgrade.js-<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.js to replace the current file (make a backup copy of the current sessionstore.js).

The sessionstore.js file is created from recovery.js when you close Firefox and is removed and copied to previous.js when you start Firefox.

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Chosen Solution

You can backup the session files in the sessionstore-backups folder in the Firefox Profile Folder to make sure not to lose possible important session data.

previous.js (cleanBackup: copy of sessionstore.js from previous session that was loaded successfully)
recovery.js (latest version of the sessionstore written during runtime)
recovery.bak (previous version of the sessionstore written during runtime)
upgrade.js-<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.js to replace the current file (make a backup copy of the current sessionstore.js).

The sessionstore.js file is created from recovery.js when you close Firefox and is removed and copied to previous.js when you start Firefox.

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Thanks. It looks like the problem was that the sessionstore.js file remained current even after restoring the profile from a backup. The sessionstore-backups folder did get reverted properly. Thanks!