Firefox Quantum 67.0.1 crashed; had to reinstall

[gregmlang]

Here's the story, from the get-go:

I started having issues with keeping new tabs at midnight local time last night; then found them in History, where they weren't connecting. At that time, I found out that the local cable company was performing "regularly scheduled maintenance" in areas of my city - as usual, they sprung it on us without notice. I had done my e-mail, etc., and resigned to catching up on my daily online articles today, which is what the new tabs were about. I left the computer on overnight, hoping the tabs would (re)load by the morning, when the cable maintenance was finished.

However, when I got up this morning and checked, *ALL* of my tabs had disappeared. To begin with, I have just checked mZ Forums; and i don't see any problems reported with FF-Q 76.0.1; also, that's been in use for awhile. This computer is set to receive the latest FF upgrades. Today, I first needed to reinstall FF. I then had to reload all my regular tabs. I also had to re-enter all my passwords. I lost all of my History.

I had number of tabs open - about 3 dozen in total - but that's never been a problem before - I've had a lot more open with no issues. There also don't seem to be any other problems on this computer, with viruses, malware, etc.

I'm wondering about a few things:
(1) Whether the cable company maintenance could have triggered or even caused this issue.
(2) Why FF-Q 76.0.1 crashed, and I lost all my tabs - which was probably part of that.
(3) I reinstalled FF-Q 76.0.1 - which is the same version I had before - but have no previous History now. Is there any way I can recover it? It has some older stuff that I wanted to recheck.

Thanks in advance for any help. Using Windows 10.


(P.S.: Sorry about the accidental brief posts, which I tried to delete ASAP. I'm using a keyboard that's a POS.)

[DanRaisch]

Have you confirmed that you don't have a new, unintended profile? It's possible that the crash (or more likely the reinstall) resulted in Firefox generating a new profile. That would explain the missing tabs and history. See this article to launch Firefox to the profile manager -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager If you have more than one profile, try launching each, restarting Firefox in between, to see if one of them has your tabs and history.

[gregmlang]

Have you confirmed that you don't have a new, unintended profile? It's possible that the crash (or more likely the reinstall) resulted in Firefox generating a new profile. That would explain the missing tabs and history. See this article to launch Firefox to the profile manager -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager If you have more than one profile, try launching each, restarting Firefox in between, to see if one of them has your tabs and history.

Sorry about the delay. I was doing research on this. Also, I had to switch back-and-forth on the mZ Forum listing categories and subcategories, before I found out that I had a Reply.

I already saw that I had two Profiles, without going into them, yet. I have a Default Profile, and a Backup one. Does this constitute two? Should there be a Backup one - and does that constitute an extra one?

I'm trying to determine if the History is associated with the Profile - but I keep on getting vague, ambiguous stuff on the internet - nothing clear, confirming this.

Basically, from what you've told me, is the History, etc., still there - if I use a different Profile? It would not be on the one active now, not the other - probably the original - one, then, I would think.

I'm also wondering if I should be able to do a reinstall, with losing all my History, etc.? Please confirm.

Let me get to trying this out. I don't need this sudden problem; things were OK until now. I'm in the middle of being busy doing a lot of stuff - a crash with an added, mystery, nuisance problem, is an extra burden.

[gregmlang]

I am going to try this in the morning. Thanks for your patience.

It looks like I'm going to have to switch from one profile to another. Hopefully I'll get my History "back", by using the other one.

I still wonder how/why another profile could/would be created, at any time?

[LIMPET235]

Hi,
You keep referring to Firefox v76. (This is not available anywhere, at present.)
Do you mean Firefox v67.0.1 as your UA (User Agent) reads?
> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0

Please read this thread for more info...
> http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... &t=3050319

[DanRaisch]

I have a Default Profile, and a Backup one. Does this constitute two? Should there be a Backup one - and does that constitute an extra one?

Yes. A default installation of Firefox would only result in one profile, which would include "default" in its name. As profiles store user data (preferences, bookmarks, browsing history, etc.) the lost tabs and history may be in the profile that was not in use when you last launched the browser.

[jscher2000]

Do you have Firefox set to restore your previous session automatically?

Did you already rescue (back up) all recent files in the sessionstore-backups folder? That's most likely in your default profile. In particular, look at previous.jsonlz4 and upgrade.json-buildid as potential sources of lost tabs. I have a tool to scrape out the URLs so you can see what is in there:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/scrounger.html

[gregmlang]

Hi,
You keep referring to Firefox v76. (This is not available anywhere, at present.)
Do you mean Firefox v67.0.1 as your UA (User Agent) reads?
> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0

Please read this thread for more info...
> http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... &t=3050319

Thanks for all the replies. I had trouble signing in (see keyboard problem below). I am sharing this computer with a friend - and just found out that they've chickened out in tackling this problem.

Yes; I have FF-Q 67.0.1. I did mention originally that my keyboard is a POS - it's hard to do it right, it mistypes, and I have to make lots of corrections.

I'm trying to make head or tail of the first page of the thread LIMPET235's posted; some of it is compounded by fractured English. Some of it looks like it's possibly connected to recent Mozilla upgrades. The rest, I'm not sure about.

I also couldn't find anything in the mZ link that DanRaisch posted, about switching profiles.

I basically need plain language advice on how to:

• *go from one Profile to another
  *choose the other profile
  *check the History (presumably under the History tab)

There was no default installation of FF this time - it had to be manually reinstalled. It just *shows* it as a Default Profile. The rest of DanRaisch's advice makes sense; but would that affect it?

Do you have Firefox set to restore your previous session automatically?

Did you already rescue (back up) all recent files in the sessionstore-backups folder? That's most likely in your default profile. In particular, look at previous.jsonlz4 and upgrade.json-buildid as potential sources of lost tabs. I have a tool to scrape out the URLs so you can see what is in there:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/scrounger.html

No; this hasn't been done yet. We'll have to do that; plus try your other advice. I don't know if the files could have been backed up, or rescued, as I didn't reinstall FF. Basically, the old install was DOA yesterday morning. Anyhow, thanks. We will both be busy all day tomorrow, however, and won't get to it until at least Monday.

Any other ideas and advice would be welcome in the meantime....

[DanRaisch]

Close Firefox. Use Windows Task Manager to make sure that Firefox is not still running but not displayed.
Then follow the instructions in this article -- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pr ... -is-closed
When the profile manager displays, click on the name of one of the profiles listed and then on "Start Firefox". Check the tabs, history, etc in that profile. If your missing session is not present, close Firefox, repeat that launch process but select the other profile and see if the missing session is there.

[dickvl]

In current Firefox releases you can also switch profiles via the about:profiles page.
Firefox 67 and later can use a dedicated profile and in case of the release update channel this is a profile with a default-release file extension.

https://blog.mozilla.org/2019/01/14/mov ... hitecture/
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/de ... stallation

You can also check for the presence of profiles that aren't listed in profiles.ini.

[gregmlang]

FWIW, I have seen advice on this matter below, on mZ forums, some time in the past - but I can't remember exactly where.

Close Firefox. Use Windows Task Manager to make sure that Firefox is not still running but not displayed.
Then follow the instructions in this article -- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pr ... -is-closed
When the profile manager displays, click on the name of one of the profiles listed and then on "Start Firefox". Check the tabs, history, etc in that profile. If your missing session is not present, close Firefox, repeat that launch process but select the other profile and see if the missing session is there.

This advice is clear and concise.

The article is a lot better. I'm not surprised it's on Mozilla's site; however, I looked for how-to info via Google, and while I got directed to their site, I only got partially relevant stuff.

In current Firefox releases you can also switch profiles via the about:profiles page.
Firefox 67 and later can use a dedicated profile and in case of the release update channel this is a profile with a default-release file extension.

https://blog.mozilla.org/2019/01/14/mov ... hitecture/
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/de ... stallation

You can also check for the presence of profiles that aren't listed in profiles.ini.

This info is also very much to the point; and hopefully relevant.

We're going to see about getting to this in the next day or two. I really do want to try to getting a solution to this problem.

[therube]

(Do you think you could change the Subject line, s/76/67/ ?)

[LIMPET235]

Edited to display the correct version.

[gregmlang]

*Damn*. Did I **** up the Subject line too? I should have caught that, when I acknowledged my error to LIMPET235. Thank you for correcting that.

Still haven't tried the help suggestions. Extremely busy, doing long hours of important (delayed) stuff; this is also the reason for the FF version typos.