Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

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

FF 13 suddenly forgets app tabs and history on startup

  • 3 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 11 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

Something that was working this morning suddenly stopped working, with no changes in between. I'm using Pinned as App Tabs, and have FF start with Show my Windows and Tabs from Last Time. I shut down FF, then restarted it, and now it's forgetting all App Tabs and Tabs from the session I just closed. I checked my settings and there's nothing clearing any history at all in there. Is there a fix or workaround for this? Was there some FF update overnight that deletes all the history on shutdown?

Something that was working this morning suddenly stopped working, with no changes in between. I'm using Pinned as App Tabs, and have FF start with Show my Windows and Tabs from Last Time. I shut down FF, then restarted it, and now it's forgetting all App Tabs and Tabs from the session I just closed. I checked my settings and there's nothing clearing any history at all in there. Is there a fix or workaround for this? Was there some FF update overnight that deletes all the history on shutdown?

All Replies (3)

more options

App (pinned) tabs and Tab Groups (Panorama) are stored as part of the session data in the file sessionstore.js in the Firefox profile folder.

Make sure that you do not use "Clear Recent History" to clear the "Browsing History" when Firefox is closed because that prevails and prevents Firefox from opening tabs from the previous session.

If you use cleanup software like CCleaner then check the settings for the Firefox application.


It is possible that there is a problem with the files sessionstore.js and sessionstore.bak in the Firefox Profile Folder.

Delete the sessionstore.js file and possible sessionstore-##.js files with a number and sessionstore.bak in the Firefox Profile Folder.

Deleting sessionstore.js will cause App Tabs and Tab Groups and open and closed (undo) tabs to get lost, so you will have to create them again (make a note or bookmark them).

more options

Yeah, I tried all of that. It just stopped working. When I rebooted the computer it started working again. Nice "feature"

more options

Try to use "Firefox/File > Exit" (Mac: "Firefox > Quit"; Linux: "File > Quit") to close Firefox if you are currently doing that by clicking the close X on the title bar.