Session Restore

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Revision as of 21:11, 28 December 2007 by Alice Wyman (talk | contribs) (→‎Default behavior: after a crash "or other unexpected close")
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Firefox 2 comes with a built in Session Store feature that saves your session data including open windows and tabs, window size and position, and text typed in forms. Session data is stored in the sessionstore.js file, located in the profile folder. To disable this feature, set browser.sessionstore.enabled to "false".

Default behavior

Firefox will offer to restore your session after a crash or other unexpected close. It will automatically restore your session after an automatic update, or when using the restart button from the Add-ons Manager.

Always restore sessions on start

By default this feature is off, but can be turned on from the Options/Preferences menu. In the Main panel, under Startup set "When Firefox starts" to "Show my windows and tabs from last time". This will have Firefox restore your tabs and form data to their state when Firefox closed (the related preference is browser.startup.page).

If you want Firefox to restore multiple windows you need to close Firefox via File -> Exit. Closing the windows one at a time will cause Firefox to only restore the last window that was closed.

Restoring a session once

Set browser.sessionstore.resume_session_once to "true" in about:config and it will restore your session the next time you start Firefox, but not again.

Firefox keeps crashing after restoring a session

If a site's content caused your crash (e.g. a plugin is crashing) restoring your session may restore that page and cause Firefox to crash again. If Firefox keeps crashing after choosing "Restore Session," choose "Start New Session."

Disable

To disable the crash recovery feature, set browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash to false:

  • Type about:config in the Location Bar
  • Press Enter
  • Find browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash
  • Double click to set it to false

To completely disable all session saving behavior, including the recording of session information, set browser.sessionstore.enabled to false:

  • Type about:config in the Location Bar
  • Press Enter
  • Find browser.sessionstore.enabled
  • Double click to set it to false

Privacy issues

Session Restore will restore connections to services which use session cookies to maintain login state, such as GMail. If someone else uses your computer after you, that person could access your personal information on those sites. If this is a concern, you should not enable the "Show my windows and tabs from last time" option described above.

You may also wish to disable the Session Restore crash recovery feature by changing the value of browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash from true (default) to to false (explained above). This will prevent another user from restoring a previous session when Firefox is opened after a crash or other unexpected close, such as system shutdown while Firefox is running.

Related bug reports

External links