New with the latest nightly builds of Firefox 3.1 is an improved (with a minor flaw) crash recovery. In the past you had two options, either reopen the last sessions as it was prior to the crash or start with a clean slate. I’ve had this happen usually due to a temperamental site that causes Plugins to malfunction (Flash & QuickTime, etc). Problem is if you try to restore your session prior to the crash and close the offending tab fast enough, you end up having Firefox crashing again (and again). This has all changed now…
Click for full-sized image
Now, you are given the option to pick and choose which tabs to restore. This way you can prevent the offending tab from reloading and causing a perpetual browser crash. Note: you will only be prompted if you have set your start page to blank or your home page. I don’t know why this prompt is not available with the “Show my windows and tabs from last time” option set. Somehow Firefox is able to determine that the last shut-down was due to a crash as I would get the old unexpected shut down message with the restore or trash last session options.
I wonder if this was something that had been planned or came as a response to Google’s Chrome. For those not familiar with Chrome ,one nice feature is each tab is an independent process instead of the browser as a whole being one process. So in the case of a website causing the browser to freeze or crash, only that tab is shut down, not the entire browser. Either way, this is really nice feature and I am excited to see this included in Firefox 3.1 (which I haven’t tried yet). Still it should be available for those of using the “Show my windows and tabs from last time”option as well. Hopefully the developers will ‘fix’ this.
Source: Mozilla Links
“Note: you will only be prompted if you have set your start page to blank or your home page.”
Wrong. You’ll always be prompted after two or more consecutive crashes, no matter what your preferences say. Please try a recent nightly to see for yourself.
@zeniko – Thanks for the corrected info. Good to know as this was the info I had gotten from Mozilla Links. I thought it was rather useless if it didn’t prompt for those of us using the “Show my windows and tabs from last time” option. I should be switching from 3.0.x to 3.1 nigthlies soon.