Twice in one month. The second time I just sat there staring at an empty form for a solid minute, too angry to even close the tab.
Here's the thing nobody tells you: your browser does not care about what you typed. Tab crashes, renderer process dies, all that form state — gone. Session restore gives you back the URL. Not the cover letter. Not the 15 custom dropdowns you carefully picked.
And autocomplete? That's for your name and address. It doesn't know about the paragraph you wrote explaining why you're a good fit.
I went looking for existing tools. Lazarus Form Recovery used to do exactly this, had a massive user base, then got yanked from the Chrome Web Store and never came back. The alternatives I found were either abandoned or phoning home, which — for a tool that literally reads everything you type — is a hard no from me.
So I built FormSafe. Chrome extension, watches what you type in forms, saves it locally as you go. Tab dies, you click the icon, hit restore, done.
Some calls I made that I'd defend in an argument:
100% local. No server. No account. No analytics. I don't want anyone's half-written job applications on my server, including mine. This also means there's no "sync across devices" — that's the tradeoff and I'm fine with it.
Passwords never touch the storage. Not a setting, not an option. Just never.
30-day expiry on old entries. Otherwise it turns into a graveyard of drafts you'll never look at again.
And here's one I'm particularly stubborn about: if a field can't be restored reliably, it tells you which one. Some of these custom JS dropdowns are genuinely hard to capture correctly, and I'd rather show "hey, the location picker didn't make it" than silently fill in wrong data and let you submit a broken application.
It's free. No account, no catch. I built it because I needed it.
If you try it and something doesn't restore right, tell me — every site builds their form widgets differently and I'm still finding edge cases.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/deklfkdfegechjgmpjinlghcllgojhni
