This is a generalization of bug 209292, which applies only to hotmail.com (see bug 209292 comment 33 through 35); it may be a consequence of bug 288462, and/or a repetition of bug 357206 and/or bug 290474. Navigation with the Back and Forward buttons should preserve form state; whenever I return to a form, the form fields should have the same state as when I navigated away. I encountered this bug on http://www.varsitytutors.com/tutoring-jobs with Firefox 8.0.1: I accidentally navigated away in the same tab to look something up, and when I returned my previously entered data was lost.

I just lost a form on this site http://www.9bis.net/kitty/?action=mail&zone=en using someone elses' firefox so I did not have the lazarus addon installed which is the only workaround, this got me very angry again. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0

Please fix this. It's especially bad on OSX since the nearly-system-wide Beginning-of-Line key shortcut is Cmd-Left which Firefox interprets as Back page. Then, go forward a page and all of your work filling out a bug report form is gone.