David Van Couvering 's Blog

Firefox 2.0 saves the day

I am working on a blog entry about Sun SPOTs. I had gotten about ten minutes into it when BAM Firefox crashed.

I restarted Firefox. I recently upgraded to 2.0, so it asked me if I wanted to restore my old session. Sure, I said. Was I surprised to find out that not only did it bring up my blog entry page, but it also remembered *every word* I had typed before the crash. Wow. It's these kinds of little things that engender passionate loyalty.

Comments

• But it crashed in the first place !!!!

  Posted by: isolatednetworks on April 06, 2007 at 02:52 PM

• If only it restored session state by default (like Opera has done for ages). I'm sure there's something you can set, but it's not obvious. Perhaps that's not surprising given Firefox's commitment to zero usability. I find myself in regret every time I absentmindedly close Firefox - I should have killed it instead.

  Posted by: tackline on April 06, 2007 at 05:39 PM

• 
  I see I've hit a sore point. Well, we developers are nothing if not passionate. Anyway, *I* thought it was cool, and I like Firefox, but maybe I just don't know what I'm missing and ignorance is bliss.

  Posted by: davidvc on April 06, 2007 at 10:00 PM

• I love this feature, but I didn't know it saved the "text" in forms ... that's even better, nice to know!

  Posted by: augusto on April 07, 2007 at 09:12 PM

• Yea, I'm with tackline. I have it prompt me when I have multiple tabs open before closing so that I can remember to just kill it instead in order to preserve the session.

  Regarding the "it crashed in the first place", I remember a demo of a computer system at a show (Loooong time ago). The fellow was demonstrating his application when the computer crashed. Without missing a beat he exclaimed "but look how fast it boots!" because that was actually a feature of their system -- improving system boot times.
  

  Posted by: whartung on April 09, 2007 at 10:35 AM

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