This probably happened to you especially if you’re running on Windows. Now, there are times when our friend Bill’s OS (at least from Windows 3.1 to XP, I haven’t tried Vista yet) have been known to be too schizophrenic to let you get through a surfing session without locking up. It has happened to me hundreds of times.

I really hate it when I’m well into my research with multiple tabs open when without any warning, the system hangs. I bring up the Task Manager and several of my applications show that stupid “Not Responding” status, including Firefox. So that leaves me with no choice but force it to close along with my unsaved and unbookmarked research. Grrr…

Good thing Firefox 2 now has the Session Restore option. Every time Firefox is forced to quit, it keeps track of the URLs and states of the tabs and windows that you’ve been browsing. When you start Firefox again, you’ve got a message with an option to restore your previous session. Neat!

Plus, you can set Firefox to immediately load your previous session automatically. Here’s how:

• Bring up Tools -> Options
• In the Main tab, there’s an option “When Firefox starts.” Click the drop-down list and select “Show my windows and tabs from last time.”