Firefox Add-on “Session Manager”

If you’re like me you often have a load of tabs open simultaneously when working on something. Recently I started development on my first Wordpress theme, and so far I must say its going along well, but when designing I have a bunch of tabs open such as the development blog itself, the back-end for the development blog, several from w3schools (my savior), and other helpful sites like CSS-Tricks and Smashing Magazine. This is all well and good and it helps me accomplish work much faster, but I’m obviously not going to finish all this work in one day, so what happens when I want to be done with development for a while but I don’t want to lost all the tabs I’ve got open, I just want to be able to start where I left off when I come back. Well I could and did just use the built in Firefox session saver, or an Add-On called Save Session (which is essentially the same thing but with a toolbar button), but what happens when between development sessions you want to do other activity in Firefox, you’ve got to work around those other tabs, and then you might forget to close out all your current tabs and save the old ones again, and if you don’t everything was for nothing anyway after all that. I found this quite annoying and thought to myself, what if I could save the sessions to files and then open them with Firefox and have all my tabs back? Well turns out, an add-on already exists that does this and A LOT more.

This little hard working add-on is called Session Manager and it does everything. You can save your session using the little toolbar icon and give it a name. Then you can reload it later and it will be like nothing ever happened. It will automatically back up your current session so if your browser crashes, you lose power, etc. you will have all your tabs. I had to use it once and it was perfect, like nothing ever happened. You can open up the folder where the session files are stored and copy the files to, say, a flash drive, and then open them in another Firefox install with Session Manager (perfect for Firefox Portable). It also remembers all the tabs you close, so if you want it back you don’t have to dig through your history to find it. And if you do restore a tab it also has you history from that tab remembered so you can use the back button. It does so much, I find myself using it all the time now. Its perfect for coordinating multiple projects. If you want this amazing add-on (I do recommend it) you can grab it by going to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2324 in Firefox and installing it. Its great, be sure to check it out. If you want a complete guide to using this add-on visit it’s Mozdev page. If you like this add-on leave a comment explaining why its useful to you. If you have any other awesome add-ons be sure to let me know!