Firefox seems to do similar-for me anyway. If I, say, accidentally disconnect my computer like I just happened to do 2 minutes ago, I can relaunch Firefox & it will ask me if I want to either start a new session or relaunch previous session. Clicking relaunch previous session will also re-open all the windows I had with all the websites I was visiting.

Thankfully I wasn't screaming while searching through the help session. Hope you found the problem.

Normally Opera is very good... For the last 'n' years I've been launching it daily with an increasing number of tabs open when it starts -- but it didn't realize that the browser with the help window was just incidental, and I didn't want it to save _that_ last setting when it got closed down (which was after I'd shut down the _real_ session).

I'd been fighting with cookies -- it seems that Yahoo doesn't handle 2 different people logging onto the same computer -- even if it is at 2 different times and the first one has already logged off -- very well -- and it seems to have something to do with cookies.

I expect I'll remember most of the tabs I had over the course of the next few weeks... and NOW I'm creating a list so this won't happen to me again!

Current versions of Firefox handle that very smoothly. I currently have 5 Firefox browser instances open, with anywhere from one to 20 tabs open. If I close the program and re-start it I will be asked if I want to restore my previous session or start a new one. As long as I tell it to restore I will get back my 5 browsers with their tabs.

Hmmm... That might be better. Don't remember the reason I prefered Opera over Firefox the last time I gave them both a test-run.

If you close each of the 5 instances of the browser individually, how does it know when you go back in that you want all 5 of those back rather than just the last one that was open before you closed it?

Unfortunately if you close each individually it will just re-open the last browser instance you close. What I usually do is open right click on the task bar, open task manager, go to the processes tab and tell it to kill the firefox process. That kills them all simultaneously. It's not ideal but it works. There may be a better way to do it, but I haven't spent much time digging.

Ah... well, if I'd thought about it, if I'd noticed, I would have just closed the help-page first. Glad to learn that Firefox is understandable in its behaviour.