A rather strange thing happened to me the other day when I opened Firefox 3. It seemed the history in Firefox 3 was gone, missing, empty, what have you. None of the tabs I had open when I last closed Firefox re-opened. When I pressed Alt-Home (clicking the Home button, for those that like to fondle their mice), I got the default Firefox search page and not Gmail like I had configured.
Pressing Ctrl-H to bring up my browser history showed a blank sidebar. I started to type gmail into the address bar and I didn’t get the nifty auto-complete feature (because there was no history).
You ever get an odd sensation where your mouth starts salivating, your palms start sweating, and your mind begins racing at warp speed?
Yeah.
So, I went to the Tools > Options… dialog and noticed that none of my settings had changed. This is getting more crazy by the second. But then I finally fixed it.
Here’s the solution (for me, with Firefox 3, on Vista Ultimate 32-bit):
- Close Firefox.
- Open Task Manager (Ctrl-Shft-Esc).
- In the Processes tab, click each instance of firefox.exe (you might want to sort on the image name column to be sure you got them all) and press Delete. Click Yes to the prompt.
- Once each instance of firefox.exe is eradicated, restart Firefox.
Now, when I open Firefox, all my browsing history is back, along with my tabs and auto-complete in the address bar.
This solution worked for me. On my computer. As with all my Windows Remedies™, your mileage may vary. If this helped you, great. Let me know in the comments. If not, but you found a different way that worked for you, let me know that too so others may benefit down the road.
Enjoy.