Textarea Cache – never lose incomplete comments/posts again

Don’t know how many times I have been part way through typing a comment/post on a blog or forum and inadvertently clicked on a wrong button, losing everything I have written to date and having to start all over again. Far too often would be my guess, and it is so frustrating. So I was very pleased to recently come across an add-on for Firefox, called Textarea Cache, which will automatically save what is typed into a dialogue box or web form and retrieve it for you, even if the browser crashes.

Textarea Cache add-on for Firefox is simplicity personified and very effective:

Once the extension has been installed, all the user needs do to retrieve text is open the Firefox add-on page (press Ctrl+Shift+A), click on the Options button under ‘Textarea Cache’ and then click on the Open cache window button:

Or, for direct access to the cache window, press Ctrl+/ to bring up the Firefox Add-on Bar and then click on the Textarea icon at the far right of the toolbar – NOTE: the icon will only be available if there is actually text saved in the cache:

In order to test out Textarea Cache, I typed a comment into a reply box on the DCT blog and then closed the browser:

I then accessed the Textarea Cache Window and saw this:

As you can see, there are options to remove an item, empty the cache completely or copy text for pasting. I also ran a test when I was about half way through compiling this article. I couldn’t close the browser of course but I accessed Textarea’s cache window before actually publishing and everything was there, images and all.

What a great and useful tool, I wish to goodness Textarea Cache had been around years ago – would certainly have saved this little Aussie a lot of time and trouble.