[Automatically Restore Previous Browsing Session In Firefox On Windows

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Harold Yengo

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Jun 5, 2024, 10:27:31 AM6/5/24

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Firefox can restore all windows and tabs that were open when it was last closed or terminated unexpectedly. This article describes the circumstances under which Firefox will restore your previous session and how you can configure it.

Automatically restore previous browsing session in Firefox on Windows

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Due to unexpected issues such as problems with a website, software errors, or an accidental loss of power, Firefox may unexpectedly close. In these situations, Firefox can restore the pages that you were visiting when it is restarted. Firefox will automatically restore your previous session, the first time you launch it after a crash.If Firefox crashes a second time, the Restore Session page will appear when you next launch Firefox.

Session Restore may keep you logged in to sites that you were logged in to before you closed Firefox. If someone else used your computer after you, they could access your account on these sites. If this is a concern then you should not configure Firefox to open all windows and tabs from your previous session.

You may also wish to disable the Session Restore crash recovery feature which is enabled by default. This will prevent restoring a previous session when Firefox is opened after an unexpected close or software crash:

To get your tabs and windows back from a previous session, you should close Firefox from the menu: Click the Firefox menu and select Exit.Click the Firefox menu at the top of the screen and select Quit Firefox.Click the Firefox menu and select Quit. If you close each window or tab, only the tabs in the final window that you close are available when you restart Firefox.

My idea is, when I'm in Firefox and want to finish what I'm doing because I can't finish it at the moment my investigation or something else, some how, save my current session (opened tabs at the moment) clicking a button and wen its saved(remember current tabs opened) Firefox closes automatically, then later or the other day when I open Firefox again, it open the homepage and a notification from Firefox showing "restore last session?" and the same notification let me select yes or close notification which will cancel that.

Firefox will save a session history file when you exit/quit normally using the menu. You can set Firefox to restore the previous session at every startup, or you can restore it yourself from the History menu. However, there's no way to set Firefox to show a list of your last session in a tab and let you choose each time at startup; I think a lot of people would appreciate that.

(Session history is a kind of history, so session history won't be saved if you have set Firefox to always use private windows or to clear history when it closes. If you never find Restore Previous Session on your History menu, that could be the problem.)

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community, it is now open for votes (kudos) and comments. Please feel free to use the comment section to add any more details to your idea. And as far as bugs go, be sure to report any issues to Bugzilla so they can be tracked properly.

Thanks for your suggestion, we really appreciate every user's feedback. I'm wondering if you can elaborate more on "fix the bugs." What issue(s) do you encounter most frequently? And what platform do you see these on (WIndows, Mac, Linux)?

(1) If you exit/quit Firefox using the menu, ALL of the currently open windows (main windows and popup windows) will be restored when your session is restored. This is the safest way to quit to avoid the "order of closing" problem.

(3) Firefox has a feature to bookmark all the tabs in the current window as a safety in case your window can't be restored. You may want to use that from time to time as a backup. You can find that using either:

I personally have usually around 30 open tabs (I work on several subjects simultaneously) , I suggest you add the ability to save tab sessions , add/remove a tab to/from a saved session , name a specific tab group session , thus I wont need to keep the tabs open , and I would call the tab session to open tabs whenever I need to work on a certain subject .

This also would prevent any problems related to losing tab session (sudden software/hardware shutdown) because it is saved . Rather than relying on Mozilla Firefox's automatic session restore which is not customizable , why not add the ability to make it customizable ?!

When it comes to choosing a browser, users are often spoiled for choice. Leading web browsers such as Chrome, Safari or Firefox offer so many similar features that the choice is often purely a matter of taste. Firefox has long been one of the most popular solutions on the web thanks to its strong security and privacy features.

There can be many different reasons why you might need to restore recently closed tabs or your entire previous session in Firefox. The most common reason is that you accidentally closed a page or quit the browser. Another common reason is that you need to restart after a Firefox update or an add-on problem (requires restart with add-ons disabled). Of course, errors in Firefox can also cause the program to crash, closing your current tabs to close completely unexpectedly. However, in this case, the Mozilla application will automatically restore your previous session without you having to follow the steps described above.

If you've only closed a single page and want to restore it, you can do this at any time in the Mozilla browser. Thankfully, there is a special feature that allows you restore Firefox tabs on an individual basis. To do this, simply right-click anywhere in the tab bar and click Undo Close Tab in the menu that appears:

Recently notified of Firefox update, and it promised open windows and tabs would be restored. They weren't. I had all kinds of things open, and now lost. Mozilla should not promise things they can't deliver. If they had said save and close all windows first, I would have done that!

The latest "update" (last night) erased over three hundred tabs in one window without any way to restore any of them while restoring three tabs in three other windows that I didn't care about. Great job.

Version 124.0.1 and it is still happening, I had two windows and both with multiple tabs and after the restart only one window came back and I lost the other with around 100 open tabs for my research. Seriuosly?

The company I work for uses Chrome and I have never had this issue before. Even if I have 5 windows and numerous open tabs in them.. they all come back after a Chrome update or automatic system restart.

I still have been trying to stick with Firefox as I like it... but I slowly lose my patience and consider to use Chrome... Mozilla developers, please make some progress with this issue. You may lose your core users who have been stiking with Firefox for ages now.

If you haven't already, you can select on the Settings page to have Firefox notify you about available updates and prompt you to install or delay the update. I've used that setting forever. There is a problem on Linux, though, because the package manager may block that setting and replace the built-in update mechanism. I don't have a good solution for that situation.

Maybe it would work to bookmark all the open tabs, but of course, this would create an on-disk record of the open tabs. (To bookmark all tabs in the current window, press Ctrl+Shift+D or on Mac, Command+Shift+D.) This would not include the back-forward history, just the latest URL from that tab. After the restart, you can right-click the folder of bookmarks and Open All Bookmarks to reload those pages in new tabs.

This has also happened to me in Firefox version 124.0.2. Firefox Menu > History > Manage History has stored all the tabs, but weeding out the open tabs from all the closed tabs is challenging. Recently closed tabs doesn't help in my case since many of the open tabs were not so recent.

Instead of closing Firefox with the X, it was suggested in a Mozilla Support thread from 2021 to use the Firefox Menu > Exit option instead. I tried this and the tabs I had open appeard when I reopened Firefox.

I also have this problem about restore last tabs today. For example, when I write this comment now, I close the Firefox window on this tab. When I open Firefox again, I expect it to open on the last browsed tab according to the settings. But it opens on tabs that were browsed a few hours ago. In the meantime, I have closed various tabs and opened newer tabs, but Firefox does not work on the latest changes.

That's very annoying. Firefox normally updates the session history file (recovery.jsonlz4) as often as every 15 seconds while you are browsing. Changes made more than 15 seconds before you closed the window should be reflected in the file when you restore the window.

Now, some users occasionally report that the file gets updated normally for a certain period of time and then completely stops getting updated. If I recall correctly, it seems to be related to memory, but don't know whether anyone has tracked down what can cause that, whether it's related to the number of tabs open, the amount of free memory on the computer at the time, etc.

As a backup, you could consider using an add-on like Tab Session Manager that can either automatically or on request store a list of the URLs of the active tabs for later restoration. It doesn't capture the full back-forward history of each tab like Firefox does, but it still might be worth it to recover missing tabs in situations where Firefox's built-in feature fails you. Here's a link to learn more: