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I am aware, thanks to a thread [1], that Firefox doesn't save sessions when browsing history is cleared at close, as effectively the open tabs are themselves cleared from the history before the session is saved.

But I would like Firefox to behave differently. Is there any way to change Firefox's behavior so it will clear my browsing history when it closes, but remember only that a certain list of tabs were open, and then restore those tabs when it opens (not even necessarily with those tabs' histories)?

I'm running Firefox 3.5.6 on Mac OS X 10.5.

[1] https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/1/381229

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The link is broken now. – Peter Mortensen Feb 2 at 19:27
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3 Answers

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I think the Tab Mix Plus addon, having its own session manager would be able to do this. You'll need to tweak the built in Firefox settings via Tools-Options-"Firefox will never remember history". I'm fairly sure that it'll work on Mac.

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I do use TMP and used to use it on Windows before FF had its own session manager, but found the TMP session restore to cause my machine to perform poorly, a view I've seen echoed in other comments recently--but granted I haven't tried it myself with the latest FF and on this system. Do you have any experience with TMP's session manager--do you know whether it's stable and whether it slows the machine down much? – Philip Jan 3 '10 at 22:46
For me (with Windows &, FF 3.5) the TMP extension is perfectly stable and without noticeable performance hit, but I use FF's session manager. TMP is such an automatic addon I haven't tried without for a long time so can't say what my system would be like without. I do know that it is incompatible with many other tab manager/tweak extensions. You can always try it, and report back if you don't like it. – outsideblasts Jan 4 '10 at 1:18
TMP didn't even work at restoring the session for me, so I didn't even get to the phase of comparing performance. I may be doing something wrong; I do have a lot of extensions that may compete with each other. – Philip Jan 12 '10 at 3:42
Via the TMP dialogue, in the "session" tab, make sure to uncheck "Use Firefox's built in session restore". You then get a bunch of options. Any good? – outsideblasts Jan 12 '10 at 4:18
Apologies for the delay. Actually that is precisely what I did that did not work. I will try again the next time FF has a significant update.... – Philip Feb 13 '10 at 23:03
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up vote 1 down vote

No need for any add-on...

You can manually force the "session restore" page to appear any time by simply using:

about:sessionrestore

Found at http://www.webupd8.org/2009/08/quick-firefox-35-tip-manually-open.html

Well, there is way to get back the Session Restore page manually, by typing this in the url bar:

about:sessionrestore

So the next time when you accidentally click on wrong button use the above trick to get back the session restore page.

Google is your friend... see also

firefox_2_and_making_session_restore_useful.html

how-to-fix-annoying-youtube-jumpiness-in-firefox

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Depending upon how much control you need, in addition to the aforementioned options, Tab Mix Plus also has a Lock Tab and a Protect Tab option, which may prove to be what you need.

If you wish to take that a stage further you could take a look at PermaTabs Mod which provides similar functionality.

Further still would be Session Manager this replaces the inbuilt session manager and that of Tab Mix plus and offers additional functionality.

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