Dear Opal:

Always save your open Firefox tabs to bookmarks at the end of your day.

With a dirty look,
Me.

It seems Microsoft pushed through an update last night—I neglected to disable Auto Updates on the Vista machine. Drat.—resulting in a reboot and costing me SIX SETS of research-filled tabs for three different projects.

It serves me right, especially when I mused to someone yesterday that I really should save them in case something went wrong. (Look at that: foreshadowing and irony in one moment. That English degree comes in handy in the most unexpected ways.)

Firefox tabs are a huge part of my day: I generally have a number of browser instances open with multiple tabs running to organize my projects, do research, and compare ideas. I have a number of Firefox plug-ins that help me out, but compared to the browser windows of my colleagues, I have a pretty light list. With regards to bookmarks, Xmarks (recently rebranded from Foxmarks) has been a huge help as I move between my laptop and desktop systems, as it synchronizes between the two and removes the “which computer did I save that on?” moment. But, of course, that doesn’t save me from myself when I neglect to bookmark things.

This morning’s little incident encouraged me to go look for a solution:

• Auto Bookmark All Tabs: an experimental plug-in which saves all of your tabs when Firefox closes.
• Tab Saver!: restores closed tabs or the previous session of tabs.

Of course, the simplest solution of all: Bookmark > Bookmark all Tabs or Ctrl + Shift + B. One small habit that may become as compulsive as Ctrl + S.