Just had what I thought was going to be a miserable experience: Had typed a lengthy response to a blog posting but was not quite finished. In the background, the Microsoft Office updater popped up, so I accepted its recommendation to update. Entered my password and it responded with “Looking for programs to update.” Spinning pinwheel of death. But not just for the updater — the entire system was locked. Could not force quit anything, could not even ssh in to kill the process. 10th Avenue Freeze-Out.
Finally accepted that my response-in-progress was lost for good and hard-booted the machine. When it came back up, Firefox asked whether I wanted to restore the previous session. Said yes, and up came all previously open tabs, including the site I had been typing the lengthy comment into, with — yow! — all of my unsaved words totally intact in the comment field, ready to resume. After a hard boot. Auto-save comes to the read/write web.
So here’s my Thanksgiving geek shout-out to everyone who has ever contributed to the Firefox codebase. You guys rock.