1077583 - Fix Gecko lifecycle to support multiple activities

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Chenxia Liu [:liuche]]

"Don't keep activities" causes crashing if we kill Gecko during initialization because we don't handle Gecko teardown if initialization hasn't finished.

This bug is to make lifecycle changes so that we don't get into these undefined states with implicit (limiting) assumptions.

Comment 1

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Let's just make sure no existing work is blocked on this bug. Existing work will need to work around the issues. Always be shipping.

Comment 2

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Reading Bug 1072831, which spawned this ticket, it becomes clear that it's very difficult to do things that one might naively think are simple, like start Gecko from a lightweight Activity before BrowserApp runs, when BrowserApp owns the Gecko lifecycle.

I think the model this ticket envisions might be a long-lived Android service which encapsulates starting and stopping Gecko (and, presumably, managing the active Gecko profile).  Whee!

Comment 3

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

See also Bug 964883.

Comment 4

[Chenxia Liu [:liuche]]

Bug 1074343 is a Fennec system-tray notification that should also be tied to the browser lifecycle.

Comment 5

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.