Firefox introduced a feature to their browser a while back that allows you to restore the session if it shuts down “unexpectedly”. The idea is presumably to cover for the times when the browser crashes, but it works equally well when you restart your computer while Firefox is running or if you deliberately shut down Firefox using the Task Manager’s process tab.

I find this a tremendously useful feature because I often have 20 or so tabs open in Firefox for a couple of days, because I haven’t got around to reading / blogging / otherwise dealing with the tabs yet, and then it crashes on me. No problem -fire up the browser again, choose the “Restore session” option and I’m back up and running.

So, two questions:

• For those times when I just need to shut down a few windows but want to retain my Firefox session, how hard would it be for Firefox to have a manual “shut down but remember my session” option. I can deal with the problem via Task Manager but that always feels a little extreme and is a pain in the neck compared with simply clicking on the “close” button. It could simply be another option on the little dialog box that pops up when you attempt to close a window with multiple tabs open. Please, Mozilla, implement this, would you?
• A little harder perhaps, because they don’t seem to have the underlying functionality in place yet as Firefox does, but couldn’t other browsers implement this too? It’s a major reason why I use Firefox over other browsers at present, as I’m reminded every time I get sucked into a Safari session because it’s still my default browser in OS X and it then crashes with several tabs open, losing everything I had planned to read later (grrrr). Internet Explorer needs this too, although somehow I haven’t been tempted to use that much recently.

One other request for Firefox, which I understand may be solved in version 3: what’s with all flash videos ceasing to work when you’ve got more than about 10 tabs open? In my experience, they play (with no sound) for 2 seconds, then stop indefinitely. I’ve used the Task Manager reset option about a dozen times or more to deal with this problem, but it really is a bug they ought to be able to fix. Haven’t been able to replicate the problem in the OS X version yet - it seems to be Windows-specific.