492190 - Public wifi redirect irrecoverably loses open documents

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Timothy Miller]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4pre) Gecko/20090422 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4pre) Gecko/20090422 Firefox/3.0

Firefox has bad behavior when you reopen it while connected to a public wifi with a login redirect.

Steps:
1. Go home or to work and open a bunch of web pages in a bunch of tabs
2. Close Firefox, saving the session
3. Go to a hotel or a coffee shop that has one of those annoying login pages that you get automatically redirected to
4. Restart Firefox
5. Note that while some of the tabs will get reloaded from cache, some will get redirected to the login page until you are authenticated

Observed behavior:
Even though you've been formally redirected, and the URL has changed, the back buttons for all of those tabs are grayed out.  There's no way to get back to the document that you were redirected from.

Expected behavior:
There needs to be some way to get back.  The back button would be good.  Or something.  Doesn't matter.

Comments:
I don't remember what the tabs were that got whacked.  I left them open because I wanted to read them.  Since the history function doesn't provide any sorting options based on when documents were closed, there's no way for me to get back to them.  Firefox simply lost them.  The ability to revert to a saved session would also be good.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

This is a mass search for bugs which are in the Firefox General component, are
UNCO, have not been changed for 500 days and have an unspecified version. 

Reporter, can you please update to Firefox 3.6.10 or later, create a fresh profile, http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/managing+profiles, and test again. If you still see the issue, please update this bug. If the issue is gone, please set the status to RESOLVED > WORKSFORME.

Comment 2

[Timothy Miller]

This is still a problem.  It's just being ignored.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Reporter, can you still reproduce using a current version?
If no, please set status to RESOLVED and resolution to WORKSFORME.
If yes, please provide updated information.

Comment 4

[Timothy Miller]

In general, Firefox still has trouble with restoring sessions.  For instance, I just had a system crash, and when I brought Nightly back up, it had lost ALL information about previously open documents.  History and past sessions are just not managed well.  There seems to be no simple way to revert to an older session, and this information is lost due to crashes and due to unexpected documents being loaded (such as when a public wifi serves a login page instead of the pages being requested).

Comment 5

[Phoenix]

Looks like valid enhancement request, but I'm not sure which section would be proper one for this