The Recovery Room

When you use a tool that “saves what you type,” the first question should always be: “How do you know what to leave alone?” At Form Recover, we don’t just guess. We’ve built a real-time filtering engine that acts as a gatekeeper for every single field you interact with. To make this process transparent, we’ve categorized our logic into two main layers: Hard Blocks and Soft Blocks. The Real-Time Filtering Engine As soon as you focus on a form field, Form Recover’s engine analyzes it. It doesn’t just look at the type of the field; it scans the entire environment:

It’s finally here. After roughly 90 days of “keluh kesah” (struggles), countless late nights, and hundreds of browser tabs crashed intentionally for testing, I am beyond excited to announce that Form Recover v0.1.0 is officially live on the Chrome Web Store. The 3-Month Journey When I started this project, I thought, “How hard can it be to save some text from an input field?” Famous last words. I quickly realized that the modern web is a chaotic place. Between complex Single Page Applications (SPAs) like React and Vue that manage state in ways that bypass traditional “value” attributes, and the “Nightmare of Iframes” found on many support portals, the development was a constant battle against edge cases. There were times when I thought the “Ghost Icon” would never align correctly, or that the recovery engine might miss that one crucial comment on a forum.

When we designed Form Recover, our primary mission was simple: make sure you never lose what you type. By storing everything locally on your device, we eliminated the biggest privacy hurdle—third-party servers. But as we talked to users, we realized that “local” isn’t always private enough. Maybe you share a laptop with a partner, or perhaps you leave your workstation unlocked at the office while you grab a coffee. That’s where the Master Password comes in.

It’s the digital equivalent of dropping your ice cream. You’re 800 words into an email, a Jira ticket, or a blog post. The screen freezes. The dreaded “Aw, Snap!” appears. And just like that, your words are gone. If you’re reading this right now, you’re probably panic-searching for a solution. Let’s look at your options. Option 1: The Browser’s “Reopen Closed Tab” (Hit or Miss) Chrome and Edge are pretty good at restoring tabs, but they are notoriously bad at restoring form data.

The idea of a browser extension recording everything you type might sound like a “keylogger.” In the wrong hands, that’s exactly what it is. However, for anyone who has lost hours of work to a browser crash, a form recovery tool is a lifesaver. So, how do you balance productivity with security? It comes down to understanding the Threat Model. The Threat Model: What are we protecting against? When you use an extension like Form Recover, you are protecting yourself against:

A form recovery extension is designed to be your safety net, catching the text you type so you never lose a draft again. But a safety net shouldn’t be a fishing net—it shouldn’t just grab everything in its path. To remain secure, a well-designed extension must have strict boundaries. At Form Recover, we believe there are three specific “No-Fly Zones” that an extension should never touch. 1. Password Fields (type="password") This is the most obvious rule, but also the most critical. Any extension that attempts to save data from a field where the characters are obscured (dots or asterisks) is a security risk.

We’ve all been there. You’re deep in a debate on r/technology or writing a heartfelt advice post on r/relationships. You go to fix a typo, your finger slips, and you hit F5 or swipe back on your trackpad. The page reloads. The text box is empty. The rage is real. Why Reddit doesn’t always save you While Reddit’s “New” design has a draft feature for posts, it is surprisingly unreliable for comments. If you are replying to someone else, your browser often treats that text input as temporary data. When the page refreshes, the browser dumps that data to free up memory.

If you write online—whether it’s CMS entries, support tickets, or long social media posts—you know the fear of the browser crash. Autosave extensions are your insurance policy. For years, tools like Lazarus (long dead) and Typio dominated the market. But it’s 2026, and the web has changed. Single Page Applications (SPAs) like React and Vue broke many old extensions. Privacy concerns are higher than ever. Here is the landscape of form recovery tools in 2026.