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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?
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?
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I downloaded Firefox so I could look at the preferences, and it's disappointing. Camino can cause all new windows to open in new tabs...
I think I found a solution...
http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/stopping_drudge_pop_unders_with_firefox/
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That other suggestion is from 3 years (and 2 major versions) ago, so I have no idea if it will still do anything. But I might try it out sometime if I run into peskier pop-ups.
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