How in the Tech

Tweak Firefox’s Session Store Frequency

By Adam Myers ⋅ December 19, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

I’m a huge Firefox fan just as most computer enthusiasts are and the current release of Firefox, Firefox 3.0, is unquestionably their best release ever. Just one of the game changing features that Firefox offers by default is the saving of active session. Basically at defined intervals Firefox will take a pseudo snapshot of your open tabs/websites and any of the forward/back navigation pages in your history. This can be a life-saver if your in the middle of a torrid 15 tab browsing session and Firefox decides to crash, as let’s face it, as great as it is, problems can occur. Instead of losing everything, simply relaunch Firefox and a dialog prompt will appear giving you the option to restore the previous session or start fresh. In addition to crash recovery, it can also save the running state on a clean exist. As I compose this, Windows Update is nagging me for a reboot so that it can finish installing an update. When finished with this post, I will close out Firefox and know that after the reboot, Firefox can be relaunched with everything still intact – even the text in this very form field!

By default, the save session state is set for every 10 seconds. If you are extremely concerned about data loss, you might be interested in knowing how to increase this frequency. Or, if you are like me, you might feel 10 seconds is a bit extreme and a waste of resources so something closer to 60 seconds may be more appropriate. Nevertheless, the beauty of Firefox is it is all customizable via about:config.

1. In a new Firefox window/tab, type about:config in the address bar.



2. From the Filter box, type browser.sessionstore.interval.



3. Double click on the result and change the value to whatever you find suitable. Remember though that the value is defined in milliseconds; 5 seconds would be 5000 while 60 seconds is 60000.