Firefox session restore: Just a little bit sweeter
The new Firefox session restore functionality that popped up a couple of updates ago is quite nice and has introduced a slight improvement to my workflow.
I don’t know about most of you but the minimum Firefox windows I have open is four and the aggregated number of open tabs is near a dozen. And that’s just at start up. After a few hours, not mention a day or two, I may have 30, 40, 50 tabs open in the four windows. Probably not more than 50 but I don’t know for sure.
This hyper surfing results from researching technical issues and when I find applicable information I want to leave it up for reference until the issue is resolved or until the info is deemed not relevant. There is nothing worse than having to waste time re-finding a drop of information in the ocean of technical documentation through which you have been wading for the past several hours, or days.
Well no software is perfect and as good as it is, Firefox and the applications it hosts do leak memory. Some a lot more than others. System requirements at startup are about 400 Meg of available RAM. At the height of a work session, with many open tabs, RAM usage will swell to 600-800M. After a few days without restarting RAM usage will go above a Gig and closing everything but the startup configuration still consumes over 600 Meg. The leakage filled up a 200 Meg barrel.
For this reason, as you all know, you have to restart Firefox from time to time to keep things perky, and operational. This is where the Firefox session restore comes in handy.
What I use to do when I needed to restart was go through every tab and close all the pages that I no longer needed, bookmarking ones that I might need again (which I hate doing because it results in a bookmark nightmare over time.) Then instead of closing Firefox normally — this is the little trick — open the task manager, click the processes tab, and kill the Firefox process. Firefox will immediately close.
When Firefox restarts it thinks it is recovering from a crash and will give you the option to restore the previous session, opening all your windows and pages they way you left them. Pretty sweet huh. There may be another way to accomplish this same thing, but it cant be as easy as this method.
And it just got a little easier with a simple check-box prompt improvement. Now I don’t have to go through the tedious process of closing the tabs I don’t need prior to restarting. At startup after a crash, Firefox now prompts with a selection of pages that were open at the “crash” and you can tick off the ones you don’t want.
Just a little bit sweeter.
