Built-in restore session hangs/freezes with too many tabs in Fx 29

Question

Hi, I've used the Session Manager add on for awhile, ever since a previous 'upgrade' to Firefox tended to not save sessions after a crash.
The upgrade to version 29 has rendered Session Manager unusable, as documented here:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1000544?esab=a&as=aaq
However I've determined that this seems to be not a problem with Session Manager, but with Firefox's built-in restore functionality. This is because though Session Manager no longer shows at startup, Firefox's native session restore does, and Session Manager can still be accessed through the "Tools" menu. It simply crashes with even a couple hundred tabs, let alone the 1-3k tab sessions I normally use.
Experimentation has demonstrated several things. (Both session restore and Session Manager work the same way, which tells me that Session Manager is probably built on the session restore function, simply adding support for multiple sessions and better autosaving.)
1. If I try to restore a large session, even if I remove almost all of my tabs from the restore, it will start to open everything, then (apparently) hang without loading any of the default tabs, and then freeze if I try to do anything at all, including clicking on the search box, trying to scroll, or clicking on another tab.
2. If I try to open a session with one window and one tab, it will open.
Not sure if this is relevant, but if I clicked on another tab before it froze, when I do a session restore from the old session it will open with that one that I clicked as the default tab.
It used to be that Firefox would only load the last tab I was on for each window, and then load others when I clicked on them. I kind of suspect that the upgrade has Firefox now trying to either load all tabs at once (rather than only when I clicked on them, as previously), or at the very least trying to get the metadata from all the pages.
I know that the sensible solution is to not have more than a few dozen tabs at any one time. But I'm not really a sensible person I've spent the past three hours trying to downgrade. I'm dedicated enough to my silly and obsolescent browsing method that I imagine I will keep trying to downgrade, security and time wastage be damned, until the issue is fixed.
On the other hand, it occurs that there may already be a patch or new add-on which addresses this issue, and that would be a lot easier than downgrading, which Mozilla quite intentionally makes painfully difficult. Is there an easier way to get my multi-k tab sessions back?
Thanks,
LK
PS: OS is Ubuntu 12.10. I have automatic updates disabled but periodically upgrade my whole system from the Terminal. My last system-wide upgrade was yesterday, the penultimate one was sometime in April, which is why I think the problem starts with Fx 29.

Answer 1

Hi, I'm a Tab junky...and I'm not changing. I have this issue also. After 2 weeks of utter frustration, not liking any of the roll backs, etc, I dove into other browsers....and found Comodo IceDragon, which is based of Firefox 26.0.... but better. I can't even describe how stable it is, even compared to FF26.
The only glitches were bringing in my history and passwords. I had to use Password exporter to deal with passwords and had to export my bookmarks and history to Chrome, then into IceDragon because it could not do it directly. But Comodo tech support was fast and very helpful!!
Give it a roll. It's like old home week, but better.