New Feature: Reader Tip of the Week (with a Bonus Firefox Session Management Tip)
Do you have a great tip for making web working more productive, more profitable, more fun? Share it with the Web Worker Daily readers. Mail your tech and other tips and hacks to tips@webworkerdaily.com. Be sure to include your blog or website address if you’d like us to link to it. We’ll publish our favorite tip each week.
To get started, I’ll share a tip for Firefox users. Do you scratch your head when someone talks about Firefox 2.0’s session management? This feature allows you to launch Firefox with the same set of tabs and windows that you had when you last exited. It’s not obvious how to access it though — Firefox doesn’t have any menu options like “Save Session” or “Restore Session.”
You enable it from the Options (Tools > Options… on Windows) or Preferences window (Firefox > Preferences… on OS X or Edit > Preferences… on Linux). On the Main tab of the Options/Preferences window, choose “Show my windows and tabs from last time” in the “When Firefox starts” dropdown.
If that’s not enough control for you, try a Firefox add-on like Permatabs, which allows you to keep specific tabs around between sessions, or Tab Mix Plus, which offers comprehensive session and tab management capabilities.
This can be handy when Firefox crashes, (as it does for me often). When you re-open it it offers you the option of restoring your session as it was when it crashed.
On the other hand this means that you’ll open up the web page that crashed Firefox again so you can have a crash loop.
In my experience, whether you have this option enabled in preferences or not, Firefox will always ask you about restoring your previous session when it crashes. But if you want it to restore previous sessions even when you’ve closed it yourself, you need to pick the “Show my windows and tabs from last time” option. I believe the default is “Show my home page.”
My favorite Firefox plugin is Session Manager. It works great and you can save multiple sessions or go back in time to 3 or 4 (or more) sessions in the past. And, it tracks closed windows/taps, if you want. It’s great.
Correction: I called the Session Manager a plugin, when it’s actually an extension. You can find more info about it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2324
Matsu, does it work with FF2?
EASYFLOWER: Yes, the Session Manager extension does work with Firefox 2. Try it.