I use a FireFox plug-in called Lazarus. Solves this problem fairly nicely for many sites, since most of them don't squirrel away unfinished form submissions.

I also tend to edit substantial posts in a real editor. So the browser crashing or even the editor crashing doesn't mean I've lost the composition. I've also heard of a browser plug-in that makes such happen automatically ("vim everywhere"?), but I've never tried it (cut'n'paste isn't terribly hard).

I use the ViewSourceWith Firefox plugin, whose named purpose is to let you configure an editor for View Source, but also lets you pop up an editor on textareas. So any post much longer than this one I just pop up gvim, and can save it arbitrarily often while writing.

or It's All Text add-on.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)
Je suis Charlie!}

I've also "lost" posts at the preview stage in the past.

These days if I think the post will require a lot of typing or reviewing, I shift-click the comment on button to open it in a separate tab so that I can continue to interact with the site in the original tab whilst I work on the post.

A few times in the past I've had my browser crash whilst preparing a long post that I've already expended considerable effort on. In those circumstances I've resorted to grepping the browser cache directory for some phrase that I think will be fairly unique and occasionally succeeded in recovering the bulk of the input from there.

It would be nice if the site remembered the data from your last preview and provided a way to recover it.

... I shift-click the comment on button to open it in a separate tab so that I can continue to interact with the site in the original tab whilst I work on the post

I took to the same approach a while back, with success.
But then for no apparent reason, instead of the mouse-click opening the tab I was selecting (as I intended), it would randomly close that selected tab.
I took this to prove that God does, in fact, exist - though, more probably, it proves that I need a new mouse ;-)

Cheers,
Rob

I mostly use Opera -- in which shift-click opens the link in a new tab.

I also use FF for some sites. I took a quick look for an equivalent mechanism but didn't find one.

---

With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority". I knew I was on the right track :)

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

Thanks for the ideas!