Onlin [e] Guid [e]

Raise your hand if this has happened to you: After filling in (filling out?) a lengthy Web form, you click Next or Save or whatever, and poof: your browser crashes, the server times out, your Internet connection dies--in other words, all your hard work is gone.

As someone who blogs for living (a task that relies heavily on Web forms), I can't count how many times I've experienced this particular nightmare. Too many times, let's put it that way.

Fortunately, there's Lazarus, a Firefox add-on that makes it easy to recover lost form data.

Here's how it works: Lazarus automatically (and securely) saves every keystroke you enter into any Web form, blog tool, comment box, or what have you. To bring back your data, just right-click and choose Recover Text or Recover Form from the context menu.

At long last, this feature is now available in Firefox 3.5 in the form of Session Restore. (Now if only it were added to Internet Explorer.) Lazarus has saved my bacon several times since I first installed it a couple months ago. I now consider it an essential part of my Web life.