I started Element to connect to Matrix chat the other day and it wouldn’t run. The message was this:
Unable to restore session
We encountered an error trying to restore your previous session.
If you have previously used a more recent version of Element, your session may be incompatible with this version. Close this window and return to the more recent version.
Clearing your browser’s storage may fix the problem, but will sign you out and cause any encrypted chat history to become unreadable.
But here’s the problem, the big buttons labeled Clear Storage and Sign Out and Send logs could not be clicked. I uninstalled the app my removing and freshly downloading it but on restarting the app the same condition applied.
The fix was to open the developer tools and do a manual invocation in the console of localStorage.clear().
Once I did that, quitting Element and restarting the app worked and I could log in again.
localStorage.clear()
I hope this is useful to someone else someday.
