Sunday, January 20, 2008

I have my crash recovery back!

I tend to have a lot of browser tabs open. Not as many as some -- I work with one system administrator who regularly has 60-80 tabs open at once. But I'll frequently have a dozen or two.

So it's very frustrating when a browser crash or power failure knocks out all those tabs. Its not always easy to find them in your browsing history.

Some years ago, the Konqueror web browser introduced a Crash Manager that created a menu of any web sites you had open when the browser last crashed. Good stuff! You could open them all at once, or pick them one at a time.

Unfortunately, some time ago that feature was dropped from Konqueror as by default. I've missed it. A lot. Fortunately, Firefox now by default will recover from crashes by giving you the option to reload all your pages. Unfortunately, that's an all-or-nothing situation, and it doesn't help you if the crash was caused by one of those pages.

At long last, I've found how to put the crash recovery tool back into Konqueror. Its a two step process:

  1. You need to have the KDE Addons package installed. On Fedora, a command like sudo yum install kdeaddons should work. Or use one of the graphical package managers like "Add/Remove Software".

  2. In Konqueror, go to the Settings menu and choose Configure Extensions. Under the Tools tab, tick the Crashes Monitor checkbox.

Since I generally prefer Konqueror for 90% of the websites I visit, I think I'll be using it a lot more from now on.

1 comment:

Vlad the Impala said...

Looks like I spoke too soon. The last power failure I had, Konq's crash recovery failed completely.

Grump grump grump.

But for the record, in Konq 3.5 the crash recovery logs can be found here:

/tmp/kde-USER/konqueror-crash-*.log

where USER is your username and * is an alpha-numeric string.