Who really cares about restoring browser state? Maybe I lose part of an HN or Facebook post I'd been writing, but that's it. The feature should be opt-in, IMHO.
Hadn't thought about it until now, but this feature may be why I don't see "I wrote you a long message but accidentally closed the tab / hit the back button / my computer crashed and I lost it, so here's the highlights I remember" emails from friends and family anymore. I would much rather discover this caveat and opt out than expect my grandmother to know it's even possible to opt in.
At this point, isn't that responsiblity larged handled by server-based autosave? GMail / Google Docs being the big ones, I assume FB and other social networking sites do the same.
I made a simple firefox/chrome extension for people like you and me that horde tabs. You might find it useful to find tabs and quickly navigate to them by clicking on the link in the list. It's free and open source. The github page has a gif showing usage.
Anyway I used an extension like this for awhile, called session buddy. But now I just use control+D and bookmark all my tabs. Then you get bookmark syncing, and you can save your tabs when you export bookmarks, or wget them to have a local archive, etc. It's just more convenient, and one less extension I have to worry about stealing my personal information or bugging and corrupting my data.
That's fair and the extension is not for everyone. It's not really meant for saving sessions or anything like that it's more for finding lost tabs in a sea of windows like I typically have. This is more for tabs that are not worth saving to bookmarks but that you have open for a long time as a transient bookmark.
FWIW, Mozilla looks at all extensions before fully approving them and the app is fully open source and fairly easily vetted if people are worried about that sort of thing.
this is brilliant. P.S. your chrome link is broken.
On suggestion - please give a button to save all of this as a "session" or something. I'm a tab hoarder and sometimes I just want to dump it somewhere and start afresh.
Thanks! the link is fixed now... I actually did just this thing the other day but didn't know if other people would want it. I will update the addon with it.
I had about ~250 tabs and i closed them now. Bookmarked before. This "feature" of FF is rly cucking. I have tons of GB written to my SSD without any benefit (i not a "safety critical user"). And the worst thing is, all of this data was written into 40 GB of SSD space.
this session restore feature, lets just save the urls in a list. that data structure cant be GB of GB right! ;) I think thats enough for the, lets say, typical FF user.
Now, that i know about this issue, i will bring down my tab usage to no more than 10 tabs.
I really care about it. I take advantage of it everyday. I close tabs and use ctrl+shift+t to reopen them, I reopen my browsers previous state after closing it, and after computer crashes I don't have to worry about losing any of my precious tabs.