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

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I accidentally closed Firefox with about 100 tabs open (doing research). I still had one ff window open with only one tab and I went to History (there is no session restore on my firefox-been thru that before) and selected restore recent tabs. That only opened about 10 tabs . BUT, now that becomes my " previous session" so how do I get my earlier session back. If I close FF and then open, all I get is that window with 10 useless tabs. This has happened before so I have FF set as default, and "open to previous window/tabs is selected". So how do I get my previous session open?

I accidentally closed Firefox with about 100 tabs open (doing research). I still had one ff window open with only one tab and I went to History (there is no session restore on my firefox-been thru that before) and selected restore recent tabs. That only opened about 10 tabs . BUT, now that becomes my " previous session" so how do I get my earlier session back. If I close FF and then open, all I get is that window with 10 useless tabs. This has happened before so I have FF set as default, and "open to previous window/tabs is selected". So how do I get my previous session open?

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Aren't there recently closed windows available when this happens?

  • "History -> Recently Closed Windows/Tabs"

Use one of these to close Firefox if you are currently doing that by clicking the close X on the Firefox Title bar, especially if you have multiple windows or Private Browsing windows open to prevent losing tabs in unnoticed windows.

  • "3-bar" menu button -> Exit (Power button)
  • Windows: File -> Exit
  • Mac: Firefox -> Quit Firefox
  • Linux: File -> Quit

You can check "History -> Restore Previous Session" and "History -> Recently Closed Windows/Tabs".


Firefox keeps upgrade.jsonlz4 files in the sessionstore-backups folder created when Firefox updates. Those are the only sessionstore files available when you can't restore lost windows via the history menu. You can copy such a upgrade.jsonlz4 file to the main profile level with Firefox closed as sessionstore.jsonlz4 to replace the file created by Firefox. Keep a backup copy of sessionstore.jsonlz4 and all files in the sessionstore-backups folder.

You can look at this tool to inspect a compressed jsonlz4 sessionstore file. This tool works locally, no uploading is done.

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