Ever since 1.5, Firefox crashes a lot more for me. It used to be rock solid.

It is incomprehensible to me why anyone would willing use a browser to write anything longer than this comment.

Gmail's AJAX interface now has autosave, so that you don't lose long messages if you accidentally shut down your browser, etc. I guess we need that for weblog authoring interfaces as well.

Wasn't it year or two ago that someone said they were posting entries from Word? What happened to that?

Imagine that! A web browser being bent to the will of an application environment is unreliable!

All hail the web, for the one thing we developers needed most is an entirely new, immature landscape to build half-functional, unreliable, inconsistent, "bleeding-edge" apps. After all, despite over a decade of advancement, Windows has utterly failed as anything more than a gateway to the browser and HTML is obviously the ultimate application platform.

You've just given us a LiveJournal-like complaint: "I had a rilly rilly great posting about Justin Timberlake going here and then Firefox crashed! This SUCKS!"

Come on. Write in a text editor and paste into your blogging tool.

I've read about some Firefox extensions that allow you to auto-save form information, though I've never tried any personally.

http://www.benya.com/software/savetextarea/
http://zestyping.livejournal.com/168089.html

I drag a text clipping to my desktop whenever I've taken the time to type so much text, and I think my session is going to timeout, etc.

Pro tip: use a clipboard history tool like ClipX**, then occasionally CTRL+A, CTRL+C the content in the textbox while you're composing it.

Poof. Instant recovery history with two keystrokes in ANY app, and ANY browser.

** It's been 15 years and our standard clipboard can still only hold ONE ITEM? How wrong is this?

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000431.html

Have you considered using w.Bloggar? It doesn't have auto-save, but it's not too hard to save your post in progress on occasion.

The SessionSaver extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=436) appears to provide the kind of protection you're after. Am about to install and test it myself.

I've heard that Firefox 2.0 will incorporate this kind of state-saving info natively.

I installed the SessionSaver, and then tried quitting Firefox while I had a blog entry half-written, and several other tabs open.

When I started back up, the browser state was identical to when I quit--including the text in the entry field.

They claim it works just as well on a crash as a quit.

That's what a posting client is for - I use IMHO Instant Blogger, but w.Bloggar and BlogJet do pretty well, too.

SessionSaver is one of the reasons I love Firefox so much. It's a must have extension.

Phil Haack wrote about the lack of a good client side persistance mechanism for web apps, including but not limited to AJAX apps: http://haacked.com/archive/2005/11/03/11098.aspx. That's one feature IE could add to leapfrog Firefox as an AJAX platform.

I use SessionSaver, and though I don't find that it is 100% perfect, it's close enough. When I experience a crash and then restart Firefox, I don't normally need to retype more than a sentence or two.