Recovering lost forms
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software
Here’s a problem we’ve all had: you’re typing something into a form on a webpage, and somehow, you lose it all and have to start again. This can be caused by an error when you submit the form (e.g. losing your Internet connection, or login session timeout), or by some other problem occurring, such as your browser or whole computer crashing. Even worse, it can happen if you just accidentally click the wrong button, and navigate away prematurely. It is absolutely infuriating, so I often copy the text to the system clipboard, or simply work in an offline editor, and save it often.
But what if there was a better way? Let’s say, a feature in your web-browser that will notice when you’re filling in a form, and regularly store a copy of what you’re working on… and not just in memory either, but persistently on the hard disk, so you can recover it even if your whole computer crashes. Sounds too good to be true? And as far as I know, it currently is… which is why I propose this as an idea for somebody to work on, or which I may implement myself sometime when I have nothing more important to do.
I’ll admit that I’m not usually much of a fan of customizing my web-browser (despite being a FireFox user) — I stubbornly refuse to add the Google or Yahoo toolbars, for example, no matter how much they might claim to ‘improve’ my experience. However, I choose to use certain key utilities, including Zotero, Web Developer, Firebug (occasionally), and the absolutely wonderful FlashBlock.
My main criteria for using an extension:
- Must serve a useful, preferably well-focused purpose in my regular browsing habits
- Must achieve that purpose effectively with minimum of fuss and clutter
- Must be unobtrusive when not in use (e.g. easy to hide or minimize)
There is plenty more I could say about criteria, but those are a few to think about. In terms of the form recovery idea, I suspect that it would normally be little more than a small icon in a corner of the browser, which will show a small popup menu when clicked. That menu will let you enable/disable the form recovery as a whole, or for a specific site or the current visit to a site (although there will optionally be a setting to automatically re-activate the next time the browser is launched).
Ideally, the available form data would be shown alongside pages in the browser’s history, although I am not sure how possible that would be — it could simply show its own history, potentially along
with different revisions, so that you can go back to an old version if you made a mess. Obviously the cache would need to be cleared quite often… e.g. keep the cache for two complete browser sessions, then delete it (although only count manually ended browser sessions, rather than accidental crashes).
So that’s the idea in a nutshell. I envisage it being an extension for FireFox, although I’m sure it would be a welcome addition to other browsers too. And if anybody knows of such an extension already, then please let me know! 
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