I recently returned from an introductory tour of the great nation of Italy. During that time I saw MANY religious paintings, a healthy number of shrines and my fair share of churches. Apart from key characters playing exactly the roles you’d expect, there were some secondary themes, including the story of Lazarus…

I witnessed Lazarus in frescoes, oil paintings, sculptures and road-side iconography. It was a can’t-miss message: he came back from the dead. Not in a zombie, vampire, ghoulish sort of way…more like: “Give him a good meal and this guy can get back to work with no one the wiser.”

Similarly, the Lazarus: Form Recovery Add-on brings your form fields back to life even if your computer “dies”. So you don’t have to start over if you’re four pages into an application for the Canadian Mounties, Oprah’s live studio audience, or the barista position at your local Starbucks.

After you install Lazarus, you can think of it like insurance. You don’t really need to use it until there’s trouble. But you can click on the ankh icon in the lower right of your browser chrome to see the menu:

And you can set all sorts of specifications. Do you want to be prompted by lines of saved text or the time your text was saved? How long do you want to save form details? Hours? Days? Weeks? Do you want to require a password to restore forms?

You can even enable Lazarus while in Firefox Private Browsing Mode. And you’ll see an option in the Clear Private Data Commands to remove the forms Lazarus has saved:

Here’s what it looks like when you need to put Lazarus to work:

Installing Lazarus is simple, and you’ll never notice it until you’re desperately happy it’s there.

Post from Elise Allen, who still thinks bringing people back from the dead is creepy. But forms are fine. See all posts by Elise Allen.