kev asleep at the wheel, 40 miles left to go

firefox need to know: restore last closed tab

after talking with jenna j about the awesomeness that is session restore, coop mentioned this little trick at work today, and it’s a great one to know.

have you ever closed a tab in firefox and immediately wished you hadn’t? did you know you can get it back? didn’t think so.

if you accidentally close a tab, you can restore it by pressing <ctrl><shift><t> (mac users: <command><shift><t>) simultaneously. voila! closed tab magically restored. try it and see!

I’ve known about that for awhile and it is indeed a life saver.

Thanks for sharing! Good to know.

It’s even better than that! If you hit <ctrl><shift><t> multiple times, it will keep reopening closed tabs in the reverse order they were closed. I don’t know what the upper limit on this is, but it has saved me a bunch of times.

Heya,

And you can do the same thing by just right clicking the tab bar in Windows. One of the options that pops up is “Undo Close Tab.”

Now, if you can just fix Thunderbird’s bizarre desire to pull all kinds of old (and I stress OLD) RSS data from to time that would be great. I’m not talking regular feed checks and updates, but rather a very odd “search and pull” that brings up posts that are months to years old. Very annoying. Doesn’t happen regularly, but once a month or so every single feed I have goes through this.

Do not like Session Restore, myself. Why? Because at the moment, for reasons I care not to diagnose (enough going on in my life right now) my non-linux OS and Firefox are having frequent divergent opinions, the OS more often than not declaring that Firefox has performed some untoward action and shutting the browser down forthwith.

Of course, persistent user that I am (stubborn in some circles), I immediately start up another session and have to keep telling the dialog box (reminiscent of Windows constant querying of “are you sure?” , “no, are you really sure?”) that NO, I don’t want to restart the session that was killed by the OS, thanks anyway (!). Seemingly the dialog box understands that the previous session ended unexpectedly (aka abnormally), so like WTF?

(Sorry, I’m a bit cranky this morning and your diametrically opposed opinion of the session restore feature required balance, I thought. Of course, if you disagree — he he, see my blog for some disagreements I’ve been treated to :) — well just don’t restart this session :-P)

Have a good day anyway.

(Oh, and I never tell MS about the failure, because, well, I’m not into helping them at all – at the moment. Hmm, maybe that’s part of it: the browser and OS have words, the browser get sent to its room, MS asks if I want to send them a report about this (1st dialog), then I restart my favourite browser and yet another dialog is bugging me before I can see the web again. Gosh, it’s been really helpful talking to you about this. Thanks.)

* waves at janice, offers hug *

You can disable session restore, as well.

if you type “about:config” in the location bar, it’ll pull up the browser preferences. filter on “browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash” and change the boolean value for the preference to “false” by double-clicking on the line. no more session restore nags! (of course, no more session restore, either :) )

Well, then I wouldn’t EVER be able to use session restore for a normally ended session.

What I want it for Firefox to not ask me if I want an abnormally terminated session to be restored. Am I just not understanding the purpose behind Session Restore? Was it only ever intended for people who want to debug some odd behaviour in the browser while working on fixing stuff?

Maybe instead of just a binary selection for Session Restore availability, a context exclusion setting could be there as well – like if it was a ‘crash’ (obviously the type of ending of the session is known, else the dialog box wouldn’t be saying it ended abnormally in the first place).

See, this bug is another feature. Maybe. Or just an unfinished UI.

Gotta go catch the ferry – THIS TIME :-)

janice: maybe you should disable the feedback reporting in windows, instead?

http://www.google.ca/search?q=disable+crash+reporting+windows

j2: Thanks for the tip about windows nosiness. Will do asap!

(Oh, and Hi Kev, thanks for letting us use your blog to chat :-)

Oh. Ranting but not checking the typing again… “MC” sb “MS”

Thx a billion times! You just saved me a lot of swearing =)