Sepero Hacker: August 2014

Recently Firefox crashed and when I opened it, all my tabs were gone.

This is how I got them back.

DO NOT CLOSE AND REOPEN FIREFOX!
Immediately find the "sessionstore.bak" file and make a copy of it to sessionstore.txt.
cp ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/sessionstore.bak ~/sessionstore.txt
(Windows users
C:\Users\name\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<random>.default\sessionstore.bak)
Open the file with a text editor and paste it into this site http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/. To make it readable, Click "format".
Save the output to a new file named "sessionstore2.txt"
Open the new file in a text editor.

At the top of my file it looked like this:

{
    "windows": [

    ],
    "selectedWindow": 0,
    "_closedWindows": [
       {
            "tabs": [
              {

I deleted 4 lines so it looked like this:

{
    "windows": [
       {
            "tabs": [
              {

Save the file.
Close all Firefox windows.
Delete the old sessionstore.js file.
~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/sessionstore.js
OR
C:\Users\name\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<random>.default\sessionstore.js
Move "sessionstore2.txt" to replace the deleted file. Rename it correctly as sessionstore.js.
Start Firefox and see if it worked.

Hopefully this helps!

An alternate way to format JSON on Linux.

$ json_reformat < sessionstore.txt > sessionstore2.txt

Sepero Hacker