Recover Closed Firefox Tabs Easily Using JavaScript

Guest Post by Quakeboy of TechTola.

Scenario:

1. You are reading a web page Page A which is loaded in a “Firefox Tab”. Let us call the tab – Tab A.
2. You are about to open a link on Page A in a new tab. You either hold down CTRL key and click on the link (OR) Right-click and select “Open link in new tab”. A new tab is created. Let us call the new tab – Tab B with page B loaded in it.
3. Now as you think you no more need “Page A” (or) you are a clean person like me and hate cluttering of tabs (or) you were curious to see what the close button would do and so you close Tab A.
4. After a while you realize you actually need to go back to Tab A and try to click on Browser’s Back button on Tab B and it is DISABLED !

Given that you don’t remember the URL of page A & you are not able to find a link back to page A. You might attempt the following things.

• As a true Firefoxian at heart, you know where the recently closed tabs will be listed. So you click History > Recently closed tabs. If you are had not closed more than 10 tabs after that, you might find your tab listed there.
• Or click History > Show all history and spend some time and finally succeed in finding it there.

As this has happened more than twice, I sat down trying to figure out a simple way in which I succeeded and so I am here to share it with you.

Solution: Create a custom back button !

Right click on your Firefox bookmarks tool bar and select “New Bookmark”. Fill in the name with “BACK !!”. That’s the name of our cool powerful back button. In the location box just copy & paste the script below and click Add.

javascript:window.location=document.referrer;

Let me explain. First we say the browser its a JavaScript. Then we tell that the current window’s location has to be set to the current web page’s referrer. Referrer is a property of every web page and it has the URL of the page from which you came from. The property will be blank only, if you had typed the URL in the address bar of the browser and opened the page.

Create another bookmark the same way with a slightly modified JavaScript and try playing with it.

javascript:alert(document.referrer);

FYI – Alert is a built in JavaScript function for showing information in a message box. To learn more cool JavaScript functions you can head over to OpenJS or W3C School tutorials. Thanks for reading this article and hope this helps you 🙂

This article was written by Quakeboy. He blogs at TechTola where he writes about the Internet, the blogoshpere and shares useful Tips and Tricks. He writes in short bursts, with just the right amount of information you need. If you have something to say, you can write a guest post here.

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