The second time, I just sat there staring at an empty form for a full minute. Forty minutes of job application — work history, cover letter, those miserable "describe a time you demonstrated leadership" essays — gone because a tab crashed.
Session restore brought back the URL. Not a single word I typed.
The thing nobody tells you
Form data lives in the DOM. When the renderer process dies, your input dies with it. The browser has no idea what you wrote. It never did.
"But autocomplete—" No. Autocomplete knows your name and email. It doesn't know about the paragraph you just wrote explaining why you're a good fit for a job.
"But the site should autosave—" Some do. Google Docs does. Your bank's loan application? The government portal? The janky ATS that 90% of companies use? Absolutely not.
Lazarus is dead and nothing replaced it
If you've been around, you remember Lazarus Form Recovery. Massive user base, did exactly this. Got pulled from the Chrome Web Store years ago and never came back.
I looked at what's out there now. Abandoned projects. Or worse — tools that read everything you type and phone home to someone's server. For a form recovery tool, that's a hard no from me.
So I built my own.
FormSafe: what I built and the calls I'd defend
Chrome extension. Watches what you type in forms, saves it locally as you go. Tab crashes, you click the icon, hit restore, done.
100% local. No server, no account, no analytics. I don't want your half-written job applications and you shouldn't want mine. The tradeoff: no cross-device sync. I'm fine with that.
Passwords are never saved. Not a toggle, not a setting. The code just doesn't do it.
30-day auto-expiry. Otherwise it becomes a graveyard of drafts you'll never open again.
Honest about failures. This one's important. Some custom JS dropdowns are genuinely hard to capture. If a field can't be restored reliably, FormSafe tells you which one — instead of silently filling in wrong data and letting you submit a broken application.
Try it, break it, tell me
It's free. No account, no catch. I built it because I needed it, and I'm still finding edge cases — every site builds form widgets differently.
If something doesn't restore right, I want to hear about it.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/deklfkdfegechjgmpjinlghcllgojhni
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