Matt Croydon::Postneo

I really don’t know what I did before I discovered the Firefox extension that changed my life: Crash Recovery. I started using it after mplayer-plugin made Firefox on Ubuntu Hoary a bit, er, unstable. Shortly after installing it I discovered that it is far more useful than its intended use (you know, recovering from crashes and all).

I quite literally haven’t quit firefox properly in weeks. Crash Recovery allows me to save my browser state in a way that I’ve never been able to before. On Linux I’ll just issue a shutdown command, which will kill Firefox in the process. When I boot up and start Firefox again, I’m exactly where I was when I shut down, after Firefox eats my processor and sucks bandwidth for a minute or two. If I need to restart in a hurry (perhaps after installing an extension), I can just find out the PID and kill it from the command line.

I also have Crash Recovery running on my desktop at work so I can get a jump on whatever was in my browser while I download email and fire up a bunch of shells. Same thing goes there, I have Windows kill it at the end of the day or if I need it dead quick I find the “end process” button.

Of course after a few weeks of this I tend to end up with tab clutter that I just can’t seem to get rid of. The first half of my tabs are things that I’ve been meaning to read for a few days or more but just haven’t had time to check out. I’m hoping that this del.icio.us extension might make bookmarking stuff a little easier, as the process of using the experimental bookmarklet just takes more time than I’d like if I have tabs running a foot to the right of the end of my computer screen.

Tab clutter aside this plugin has really changed the way I do things across platforms. I would strongly suggest that anyone interested in a) something that can let you recover from a crash or b) save your browser state in a wicked way should check this puppy out.