How in the Tech

Never Lose Your Form Data in Firefox Again

By Adam Myers ⋅ July 8, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

If you’ve been an Internet user for more than a couple months you’ve probably experienced the following scenario. You’ve just completed a long web form and click Submit to post the data back to the website only to find out the submission couldn’t be completed. Sometimes the web server in question is experience problems, sometimes your browser crashes, sometimes it’s not even explainable. Going back to the form more often than not results in a blank form with none of your keyed in data. You are typically left with no choice but to practice those typing skills and fill out the form yet again, this time crossing your fingers when you reach for Submit.

Sound familiar? It happens frequently enough that a Firefox extension was developed to cure the curse. Lazarus Form Recovery saves the form data into it’s own SQLite database as it is entered. This allows for a quick recovery should disaster strike and the data is lost before submission. Seems like a pretty obvious solution to the problem right?

Typically this would be the point in time where privacy advocates would chime in about the negative impact Lazarus has. Thankfully, the addon has addressed many of those concerns by automatically expiring collected form data after a user configurable time-out period. When the time is up the form data is purged. Additionally, the restoration of form data can be password protected – in that a password would be needed before data could be recovered. Thirdly, all form data is encrypted in the SQLite database. I believe these three features satisfy even the most security and privacy conscientious individual.