A Forgiving Web Browser

Life Hack Rave

Jef Raskin proposed the First Law of Interface Design, paralleling Asimov’s First Law of Robotics:

A computer should not harm a user’s work, or (through inaction) allow a user’s work to come to harm.

Web browsers break this law regularly. When was the last time you lost all the data you entered on a form because your browser/computer crashed or something went wrong? And how many times have you spent 10 minutes relocating a crucial (or hilarious) web page because you closed the wrong window? Entering data into a form is work. Navigating through the petabytes of information on the internet is work. One wrong move, one brownout, and poof! There goes your data, your history, and that web page.

Enter Session Manager, a plug-in for Mozilla Firefox. Since I installed it, I’ve lost my fear of closing windows and tabs. Although Session Manager offers a lot of features, I find I only use two: “session saving”, and “undo close window/tab”.

Session Manager periodically saves your browser “session”. Your “session” is the complete state of your Firefox browser: every tab and every window, with all of their browsing history. If your computer or browser crashes, you can open up Firefox, select “Current Session” from the recovery window, and bam! Your browser looks exactly like it did the last time you used it. Even better, Session Manager can do this all the time, so that whenever you open Firefox, it will look exactly the same as it did when you quit.

There are a couple different plug-ins that do all of that, but Session Manager has something more: “undo close tab”. Session Manager offers a much-needed undo for closed tabs and windows. Pressing the button re-opens the most recently closed tab or window, with all of its history. Did you accidentally close the tab containing that page buried deep in a forum telling you exactly how to fix your computer? Don’t worry; just click the “undo close tab” button! It works like a charm.

I’d like to again point out that in every case, each tab and window is restored with its full history. You may think this is just another cool feature. But you spent hours working through that forum figuring out how to fix your computer. You visited a hundred pages, each with its own small piece of the puzzle. Your history contains half of the information you need to finish fixing your computer. Or maybe just the one page which all the other pages are linked from. But Session Manager remembers all of that information, and it’s there when you need it. You can surf with confidence.

Unfortunately, Session Manager does not come with Firefox, and is not configured “out-of-the-box”. The rest of this article is about setting up Session Manager so that it works like I’ve described.

1. Install Session Manager by following the instructions on this web page.
2. After installing, select “Extensions” from the “Tools” menu.
3. Select “Session Manager” from the “Extensions Window” and click on “Options”.
4. Click on the “General” tab and make your screen look like this:
   
5. Click on the “Undo” tab and make your screen look like this:
   
6. Close the options dialogue and the Extensions window, and forget about them.
7. Add the “Undo Close” button on your toolbar:
   • From the “View” menu select Toolbars > Customize…
   • Find the “Undo Close” icon (it should have a red cross on it) and drag it to your toolbar.

That’s it! Admittedly, it was a bit of a pain to get a feature that should be built into the browser, but it’s worth it. You’ll never worry about closing windows or tabs again.

That’s been built into Opera for ages. If it crashes then you just re-launch it and it’ll open all the same tabs, including their back/forward-history.
Opera has also had the “Closed pages” functionality for a long time. If I want to open a window that I closed earlier I just select it from the Closed list and it’ll open (with its back/forward-history).

It’s a shame just about everything else is bad with Opera.
Thanks for this, I’ve been meaning to install it for the past 3 days but kept being lazy. It was a nice push :)
What I found nice with session saving when using Opera is that it pretty much negates the need for a homepage. I’ve always had trouble deciding what should be on my homepage. Usualy I start up my browser knowing exactly where I want to go, or use the toolbar to search google. So logically it can just be blank. But then I’ve always felt uncomfortable loading up a blank page. I don’t know why, I just have. Session saving means it loads up in a possibly meaningful state.

Thanks for that, Marcus. I didn’t know that about Opera. I now have a copy on my system to play with. (Unfortunately, I do enough web development that I tend to spend most of my time in IE and Firefox–which still have the lion’s share of the market).

As a quick note, the “undo close” button that Session Manager offers is actually a bit cleaner than Opera’s trash” menu. It is simply an undo button: one click and your last window is re-opened.

You can ctrl-z to get your last closed page in Opera as well which I use 99 percent of the time.

Since you can do that, I’m certain you can create your own toolbar button to restore with one click instead of the pulldown.

Not a humanized approach for sure to customize Opera, but *my* version is so tailored to how I think that I was once told that when I look up something on the internet using this browser, my computer looks like in the movies where screens just fly by and the user instantanly gets access to whatever information they need.

In fact.. the button is here:
http://operawiki.info/CustomButtons
Search the page for:
“Reopen closed page (with closed window list menu and with “document” icon)”
Just click that using a recent version of Opera and drag it where you want the new button on your toolbar. Instant restore of the last close tab- if you click the arrow though, you get the behavior of the trash can icon.

Google Desktop indexes web pages you’ve viewed recently — not just the titles, but also the contents of the pages. This makes desktop “refindability” a breeze.

i installed my first firefox 0.7 with the tbe plug in (http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/tabextensions/index.html.en) and it’s with me ever since, still growing it’s list of features.
Since then i just click the tab bar with the middle button to undo a closed tab.
It remembers the tab session and does a ton of other useless stuff (like displaying a thumbnail of each page on it’s tab).

Very cool—I needed exactly this earlier this morning. Thanks.

BTW, filling out forms on-line—and logging in to sites—is considerably less work with Roboform Pro. I highly recommend it to your attention.

Beware: Shameless plug!

>A computer should not harm
>a user’s work, or (through
>inaction) allow a user’s
>work to come to harm”

That’s exactly what I was thinking, when I wrote LiveSaver (see my URL for details).

It is a small JavaScript that saves form input on the fly. When any accident happens, be it a reload, a session time out, a crash or a power-outage, your data has been saved already. When you come back to the page, your text reappears.

LiveSaver can be integrated into any website very easily and it is supposed to work in most common browsers.

Oh and it’s OpenSource.

Best,
Jan
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Quick information about Firefox 2.0 beta:
I know the “Undo Close Tab” feature will be included in 2.0, but I don’t know about session saving. Until then, thanks for the tip!

Hello, very nice site, keep up good job!
Admin good, very good.