It seems that I spend a lot of time these days filling out online forms for one reason or another. Every site I go to wants some bit of information, and in some cases the amount of information I need to type in is quite large. How many times have you been filling out a long form, hit submit, and to your chagrin the server times out or there is a network error. When you go back to the form again all of the information you just spent hours filling out has disappeared into the ether of the Internet and you have to type it in all over again. Well, I stumbled across an add-on for Firefox the other day called Lazarus that is designed to remove that frustration forever.
Although there are ways to write online forms that will retain the information even after running into an error message during the submit process that vast majority of sites seem to forget to do it. Lazarus has one purpose and one purpose only, to save your typed in form information in the event that something goes wrong and you have to go back and reenter the information. Say for example the server crashes just as you submit a very long complaint form. This handy Firefox add-on even works with WYSIWYG and rich text boxes, saving even more time by preserving the formatting of the text you have entered.
If and when your browser connection times out or the remote web server has a breakdown all you need to do is hit the back button. At first the form will be empty (probably), but by right clicking on each blank in the form you can recover the lost information. Lazarus is a free add-on for Firefox and can be obtained either by going to the Lazarus Add-on web site or by using Firefox's built in add-on browser.
