Losing tab history in Firefox

[dougo]

Once again I lost my tabs in Firefox. I often keep several web pages open in tabs as a sort of to-do list, for things I'm currently reading or plan to read or otherwise do something with. These tabs often stay up for days or even weeks, and with the "When Firefox starts: Show my windows and tabs from last time" preference, the tab set will persist across Firefox restarts. Occasionally, however, I will close the main Firefox window, only to find out that there's a pop-under window (or sometimes closing the window will cause one of the pages to open a "sorry you're leaving!" pop-up, which is what just happened now from a T-Mobile page). Then when I close that window and restart Firefox, it reopens just that pop-up and nothing else, because that was the windows-and-tabs configuration when I quit. And as far as I can tell, there's no way to find my tab history—and since some of the tabs have been sitting there for days, they don't show up in the recent global browser history, and I often can't remember what was in them at all (the whole point of keeping the pages in tabs was to not have to remember them).

So, first of all, probably I should be using "File->Quit" rather than closing the main window. But that might be a tough habit to break, since I always do everything in a single window, so I expect those to be equivalent. (And I don't actually know if that will avoid the problem anyway, especially in the case where a page tries to opens a new window after an old one closes. I should experiment. Edit: Nope, "File->Quit" does not prevent a page from opening a "goodbye" pop-up that clobbers the tabs state.) But my question for the audience is, is there a good Firefox extension (or a hidden preference or something) that will record your windows-and-tabs history in a way that lets you restore not just the last state when it exited, but some previous state? Or is there some other way to address this issue? Like, is there something I can do after I've closed the main window that will restore its tabs so I can safely exit?

By the way, I do have pop-ups turned off for the most part, but some sites only work if you enable pop-ups, even if the pop-up just wants to open another tab (e.g. T-Mobile). I want there to be a way to only enable "well-behaved" pop-ups, but disallow pop-unders and other kinds of pop-ups that open new windows or resize the current window. Or is this equivalent to solving the halting problem, since it involves arbitrary JavaScript?

Comments

[mshonle.livejournal.com]

1. Use AdBlock Plus. I was shocked to hear that pop-unders even existed anymore when I read your entry.

2. For those important pages you don't want to bookmark, but want to keep around longer, drag the URL icon to your desktop.

3. Kill the process to keep your tab state.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

You know, I've used AdBlock Plus before, but I stopped for some reason and I don't remember why. I just reinstalled it. But, I don't think it would have helped with this pop-under (actually a pop-after). Try this:

1. Go to http://www.t-mobileg1.com/ (warning: it has a flash app with audio). Click on "I want one >>", then at the "Already a T-Mobile customer?" dialog, hit "No".
2. That brings you to another page with a flash app (although no audio this time). Wait for a few seconds, then hit the "Buy now" button. If you have pop-ups blocked (the standard Firefox preference), you get the message from Firefox about blocking a pop-up (or the warning icon on the status bar). You have to allow pop-ups for www.t-mobile.com in order to go further. Then when you hit "Buy now", it opens a new tab (assuming you set "New pages should be opened in a new tab" in the standard Firefox preferences).
3. In this new tab, hit the "Buy now" button. This brings up an internal pop-up window about 3G connectivity. Hit "continue".
4. You're now on a page about plans, but the phone has been added to your cart. Click on the "Cart" link on the upper right.
5. Close the tab (or the whole window). You then get an external pop-up window saying "Thank you for visiting T-Mobile.com".

At what point would AdBlock Plus have helped? I think the only thing I could have done is re-blocked pop-ups from t-mobile.com after step 2, but how was I to know there wasn't going to be another button that required pop-ups to be enabled?

[mshonle.livejournal.com]

I closed the whole window for step 5. Never did I see a "Thank you" window.

The popup for step 2 was opened in a new tab. I didn't have to enable or disable popups, it knew I wanted it to happen because I clicked on it.

I may have set some other things in Firefox to get this to happen, so it might not just be AB+.

[mshonle.livejournal.com]

But the real story here is that if you want a page to persist over multiple days, drag the URL to the desktop already (or a folder or whatever).

[dougo.livejournal.com]

That requires some forethought. Usually what happens is I open something in a new tab, read some of it, get distracted and go to another tab. I might return to the other tab in a few minutes, or it might take me a few days to get back to it, so I don't ever really know how persistent I need it to be. Dragging the URL to the desktop is too much overhead for this sort of situation, I think, and if I did it for every tab that I don't immediately read to the end and close, my desktop would be full. Or I would have to delete each one after finishing, which makes it twice as much overhead.

But really, TabMix does exactly what I want: it gives you the option of restoring the previous-to-last tab configuration upon restart. Maybe someday I'll find I want the third-to-last instead, but for now I'm happy.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Bleah, that's annoying that it's not reproducible. Note that you have to have something in your cart before closing the cart tab. But I have no idea why step 2 worked without explicitly allowing popups from t-mobile.com, unless you already had popups enabled globally.