530027 - Please integrate the "Textarea Cache" form-saving extension into Firefox

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Jason Spiro]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009101601 Firefox/3.0.15
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009101601 Firefox/3.0.15

After spending half an hour or half a day typing in a TEXTAREA, there are many ways to lose your work.[1][2]  You haven't yet managed to enhance Fx to guard against every possible such way.  :)  That's why the form-saving extension Lazarus[3] has been downloaded half a million times, and Textarea Cache[4] thirty thousand times.

But some users don't install preventive extensions until it's too late.  To help them, please make Fx remember the contents of the last TEXTAREA or two that they've worked on.  Perhaps in a formbackups directory stored alongside the bookmarkbackups profile subdirectory.  Maybe you could also provide a UI to access the backups.  The backup functionality should work on all http:// sites; if you want, it can work on https:// sites too.

^  [1].  http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2009/10/29/saving-what-you-typed-in-firefox-or-wordpress-locally-to-your-compouter/
^  [2].  http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2009/09/01/textarea-cache/
^  [3].  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6984 -- closed-source, and one of the authors has told me that at least for the next year or so, they can't release their code even to the Mozilla Foundation.
^  [4].  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5761


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jason Spiro]

Actually, WillPittenger reminded me:  You could just integrate the "Textarea Cache" form-saving extension into Firefox.  It works for me, and gets good reviews.  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5761

Comment 3

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

Probably best to bring it up on mozilla.dev.apps.firefox; it will get lost here in Firefox-General...

Comment 4

[Simon Bünzli]

This bug as filed is INVALID. Please either be more specific about what the problem is or what kind of feature you're lacking (even though for the latter, the newsgroups really are the better place for discussion).

BTW: We already do save textareas for the case of a crash or when restarting the browser, which would make this bug WORKSFORME. And if Session Restore fails you for some reason, please file new bugs with steps to reproduce them (after having made sure that it's neither bug 345135 nor bug 424872).

Comment 5

[kriegste]

Is my description in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557781
also "INVALID"?