The laptop died; the tabs didn't notice

A journalist is four months into an investigation: 300 Firefox tabs, a dozen logged-in archives, bookmarks sorted by source. Tuesday morning the laptop won't turn on.

Firefox was never running on the laptop. It runs on a display inside a container, and the laptop was rendering the display URL. She borrows a colleague's machine, opens the same URL in Chrome, types the password for the proxy group, and Firefox is exactly where she left it. Same 300 tabs. Same logged-in sessions. Same half-written search in the address bar.

The replacement laptop arrives Thursday. Setup is a bookmark.

No sync account, no "restore previous session," no re-authenticating to twelve archives. The research session was never on the laptop. The laptop was just looking at it.