I wish I could just visit about:tabs and see a plain text listing, one URL per line, of all the tabs I have open.
No esoteric attack vectors, no major new features or integrations, just a quick and easy way for any user regardless of technical ability to dump their tabs before they update firefox or reboot their system ...
... since everyone has been burned by a FF restart that, for unknown reasons, fails to restore tabs even when configured properly to do so.
As it stands, you need to dig several directories deep into /Library (or whatever, depending on your OS) and then use JSON tools to export ... I've already lost most people.
FWIW, rsync.net has an outstanding $1500 bounty for this feature[1]. Consider this an inflation adjusted bump to $2500.
I have a extension that does that almost pretty identically to what you are looking for... it does list out every page you have but doesn't list the url. there is an unreleased version that I use that has a tab dumping to json that I use for just that session restore reason.
Maybe I'll finish the updated version and release it soon.
Firefox's session is stored entirely within sessionstore.jsonlz4 in the profile folder (and backups, or while running, in sessionstore-backups) -- locate using about:profiles. It's a nonstandard lz4 container but you can find implementations, e.g. lz4json/lz4jsoncat in some package managers.
Once decompressed you have json lists of windows of tabs, including recently closed; for every tab, urls and titles of each entry in per-tab history, base64ed favicon, last selected time, and various less useful data (some still incomprehensible -- binary serialized or cache keys?). Cookies and data from extensions like treestyletabs are in there too.
OTOH... is there a currently working deserializer for Chrome's session files?
Indeed! Dumping this recovery.jsonlz4 file on the command line is how I inspect and archive all my tabs and windows. You can do this on remote systems, too, and Firefox does not need to be running.
> ... since everyone has been burned by a FF restart that, for unknown reasons, fails to restore tabs even when configured properly to do so.
I've actually had this several times with Chrome, but never with Firefox. The major point of me moving to FF actually was when Chrome lost 50 Tabs once again.
Firefox reliably remembers my tabs, but never my pinned tabs-- which, of course, are the ones that I actually want to be preserved across restarts. In my dream world, pinned tabs persist forever, and are even accessible across devices, perhaps sorted into separate containers à la Sideberry.
I built [1] for the reason to save and restore the browsing tabs. It has export and import sessions feature as a by product. [2] also has a test list mode on tabs.
Great takedown in the linked thread. jhardy54 snarks that the author just needs to open a patch. When rsync presses, it turns out jhardy54's own patches have been completely neglected by the maintainers and he hasn't been able to merge them in.
No esoteric attack vectors, no major new features or integrations, just a quick and easy way for any user regardless of technical ability to dump their tabs before they update firefox or reboot their system ...
... since everyone has been burned by a FF restart that, for unknown reasons, fails to restore tabs even when configured properly to do so.
As it stands, you need to dig several directories deep into /Library (or whatever, depending on your OS) and then use JSON tools to export ... I've already lost most people.
FWIW, rsync.net has an outstanding $1500 bounty for this feature[1]. Consider this an inflation adjusted bump to $2500.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24524923