It’s a funny thing how much we come to rely on software for repeated executions of the same function over and over, and shocked and frustrated we are when it suddenly doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. I rely heavily on Firefox’s ability to re-open tabs – rather than bookmarking sites, if they’re something I want to look at later, I’ll just leave them open in a tab. I’ve had tabs open for weeks at a time if it’s something that’s low-priority. I shut down Firefox, and every time I re-open it, my tabs come back…until today. Today I started up Firefox, and none of my tabs re-opened. In fact, it didn’t even load Google as my starting page. I was staring at a blank screen. I exited and re-started, hoping to see the message about it restoring previous tabs from a crashed state…nothing. I checked under HISTORY > RECENTLY CLOSED TABS…and nothing was there because I set the privacy settings to purge pretty much everything upon exit. Damn.
All my tabs were gone – I had about four of them, and I can’t recall what they were. Lost forever amongst the myriad of sites, never to be found again. I was completely baffled that Firefox didn’t do what it was supposed to do. Thankfully it seems to be working properly again, but I’ve now changed my privacy settings to not purge the history in case it happens again. Hopefully Firefox won’t do this again…maybe it’s acting up on me because I criticized the people who created it. 😉