User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a3) Gecko/20040802 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a3) Gecko/20040802 One of the most annoying scenarios of the browsing experience is having spent an hour perfecting the wording of the penultimate forum message, only to find your Mozilla nightly (or even release) has crashed for some reason, or accidentally closing the tab, or pressing reload, etc. Your text is gone, gone forever! Aaargh! Perhaps some temporary text file could be written to the disk somewhere when over n characters are written in a text field, so that if something bad happens there would still be the possibility of salvaging your text. The file could, say, rotate every 5 minutes, and after 3-4 rotations return to the original file, so that no more than 4 copies are used. Of course there might be more sophisticated or elegant solutions for this problem. And maybe a pref could control this feature. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:

Files on disk could have privacy and or security issues.

(In reply to comment #1) > Files on disk could have privacy and or security issues. Not more than, say, mailbox files, right?

This is similar to Bug 16360 (MailNews) and Bug 147261 (Composer). Both were duped to Bug 16359 (Editor: Core). CCing master-duper R.K.Aa to make the call ;-) Prog.

Correction: The MailNews bug in my previous comment was supposed to be Bug 21213. Sorry for the spam, Prog.

Indeed, if someone were to expand the scope of 16359 to autosave of everywhere the user types a lot of text, this would be a dupe.

Re comment 3: Thanks for the confidence.... This is basically the "crash recovery" RFE, but also dup of several other bugs.. A: Bug 158258: "HTTP form POST data is lost on (accidental) close, quit or crash" B: Bug 35448 - "autosave to forms (slightly different from wallet feature)" - was duped to already mentioned bug 16360: "mail/news compose autosave" Perhaps a questionable dup'ing since bug 35448 is more similar to bug 158258) C: And Editor/Composer is (also as earlyer mentioned) covered in bug 16359 And several others. But all in all, loss of form data or text in browser forms, mailnews and composer are covered, far as I can see. And as an extra security valve there's bug 48333: "Ask for confirmation of window close if form has been edited" (There's already a pref for tab-closing prompts.) Regarding reloads: Form text don't vanish on reload unless the particular page prevents caching. So that isn't a valid issue, IMO. I just reloaded this page here and an awful lot of text remained in this form... Resolving as dup of bug 19454 - see other dups and dependencies there. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 19454 ***