If you've ever had your browser crash halfway through writing your fourteen-point rebuttal to cmdrtaco, you know the value of auto-saving text in web forms. Gmail and some other more sophisticated web apps will auto-save your compositions every few minutes, but for those web apps that don't offer such features there's a Firefox add-on, AutoSaveTextToCookie, that can pick up the slack.
AutoSaveTextToCookie does exactly what its name implies. Whenever you start typing in a text field the add-on will create a new cookie and save your text into the cookie. If your browser crashes or you accidentally close a tab, your text will be restored.
Unfortunately AutoSaveTextToCookie is Windows only and since Firefox is notably cross-platform that makes it a less than ideal solution.
For those us using OS X or Linux there are some other possibilities. The Session Manager plugin offers similar features (and a good bit more). The downside the Session Manager is that it replaces the default Firefox session manager.
Another option is the Greasemonkey script TextArea Backup, but TextArea Backup saves its entries to about:config which means there's no easy way to get rid of them.
Another possibility is Form Saver, but keep in mind that it was developed as a helper app for web developer's testing forms and stores its data in plain text bookmarks — less than ideal in some situations. And of course you have to remember to bookmark the page while you're typing.
Note that if you're using a Firefox 3 beta build Session Manager or TextArea backup are the only ones in the bunch that have been updated to work with Firefox 3.
Frankly none of these extensions is perfect fix. In my testing AutoSaveTextToCookie was the simplest, though it occasionally auto-filled forms with text from another, older form. Hopefully the developer will have time to fix a few of the bugs and release a cross-platform version in the near future.
[via Lifehacker]
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