1281048 - Session Restore doesn't work in Firefox 45 ESR

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Drew]

Firefox 45.2.0 ESR doesn't do session restore, under any circumstances.

If it crashes, upon restarted session restore doesn't work. If I exit using the top-right X button, session restore doesn't work. If I restart the computer while firefox has windows open, session restore doesn't work. If I close firefox using the file/exit menu, session restore doesn't work.

When Firefox is restarted, it doesn't automatically restore the tabs. It doesn't show a "about:sessionrestore" page. It doesn't list anything in "recently closed tabs" or "recently closed windows". The "Restore Previous Session" menu item is disabled.

The previous ESR version had no trouble restoring sessions. I have my list of tabs from during the upgrade, from the "sessionstore-backups" directory, but I can't restore that session until this feature is re-enabled.

I'm marking this as critical, since it results in major data loss.

Comment 1

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until April 26)]

[Tracking Requested - why for this release]: potential dataloss

Comment 2

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Hello Drew,

I'm unable to reproduce the behaviour you're seeing using 45.2.0ESR on my Windows machine.

If you're willing, I'd like to get some diagnostic logs from you. Can you please do the following:

1) Type about:config in the URL bar and press enter
2) Click "I accept the risk!" button
3) In the "Search" text input at the top of the page, type in browser.sessionstore.debug
4) Below the search, there should be some results. One of those results is browser.sessionstore.debug (you can ignore the other one(s)).
5) Double-click on that row in order to flip browser.sessionstore.debug to true

Now the Session Store back-end should start logging. The next step is to try to get some useful logs from it.

6) Restart Firefox
7) Open up the Browser Console by typing Ctrl-Shift-J - this is where the logging output should go
8) Open one or two tabs and load some pages in them.
9) Copy the contents of the Browser Console, and either paste them here in this bug, or e-mail them to me directly ([e-mail]).

Hopefully there's something useful in there that would help indicate why we're having difficulty writing the session data to disk.

Comment 3

[Ritu Kothari (:ritu) (Inactive, please n-i to RyanVM, jcristau, or pascal)]

Hi Florin, can your team help repro this bug and/or help provide logs to Mike as well? Thanks!

Comment 4

[Alexandru Simonca [:asimonca], Release Desktop QA]

Attachment: esr-45.2.0-crash reporter bug 2.txt

User Agent 	Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0

Hi,
I was not able to reproduce this issue on Win 10 x64 & Win 7 x64 using Firefox ESR 45.2.0.
I have attached a diagnostics log that I got using the STR from Comment #2.
If there is anything else I can help with, please ni? me since Florin is on PTO.

Comment 5

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

It's possible a file in your profile has become corrupt, and a Firefox Refresh could clear it up. Read the article carefully first: not all data is carried over, and in particular extensions (add-ons) and preference settings are not because those are common causes of Firefox not working as expected.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings

Without the requested logs I don't see any way to make progress in this bug.