>A friends asked me about saving sessions in Firefox and having it restore your session automatically at startup. I told him that your sessions are restored after a crash and that what I do is shutdown my computer with my browser open to ensure that when I turn it on next time and launch Firefox it would ask me if I want to restore my latest session.

I’m the one who wrote a post about wanting the Save/Restore session feature in Firefox. Then I thought about it realizing that it’s been over a year since I wrote that post, there had to be some progress made in that area since I’m convinced that I was not the only one asking for that feature….

Guess what? It was there all along! Indeed, Firefox stores your sessions but it simply does not offer to restore them on start up by default. The default behavior is to offer a restore after a crash or unexpected close. Firefox also automatically restores your session after an automatic update and when you use the restart button from the Add-ons Manage.

One year of voluntarily crashing my browser and I had no idea I could simply ask it to restore my session and close it nicely.

For those of you who want to know how to do this simply to go Tools>Options>Main under Startup you’ll see When Firefox starts: choose the third option Show my windows and tabs form last time. The default option is Show my home page. Voila!

Why would you want to do this? Because you need to close your browser and wish to come back later, or on another day, to the same pages you were visiting when you left. I wonder if Internet Explorer has that feature too?

>Gone are the days where I refused to switch to Firefox 2. Not only had it stopped crashing on my laptop but, and that the best part, I find the restore session feature so convenient. It’s really meant for people like me who always surf using multiple tabs. I always have emails I didn’t finish writing, articles I hadn’t start reading or forum threads to clean up and so on. So when my computer suddenly goes off because of a blackout I’m really happy to have my Firefox session fully restored as I open my browser after restarting the computer.

There is only one thing missing (or maybe I’m the one who does not know where to find it). There need to be a way to save a browser session before closing the browser voluntarily. So far the sessions are close only when the browser closes “unexpectedly”.

Since there is not “Save my Session” option in the menu, when I need to save a session before I shutdown my computer all I do is leave Firefox open and then shutdown. Firefox is forced to close and the next time I turn the computer on it asks me whether I want to restore my session and Voila! I’m sure they’ve thought of that feature but I wonder why they didn’t actually implement it?