1051585 - After rebooting windows with "firefox.exe -silent", firefox thought it crashed and show a session restore tab.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[richard.berger]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140716183446

Steps to reproduce:

Restarting windows while firefox is open.


Actual results:

Windows rebooted. Firefox complains about an crash and shows session restore tab.


Expected results:

Windows rebooted. Firefox should open normal with the last tabs open. That worked just fine in Version 28. After upgrading to version 31, this bad behavior was introduced.

Comment 1

[Andreas Wagner [:TheOne] [use NI]]

I don't think there's much we can do about that. When you shut down Windows, all open programs get a small amount of time to quit themselves. If they don't manage to do that, Windows just kills the process, leading to a dirty state of Firefox.

Comment 2

[richard.berger]

I am aware of that. But that worked for years flawless, until I upgraded to Firefox >=29. Thats the reason why I am reporting this. Something has changed to the bad in that versions.

Comment 3

[Loic]

Is there a way to simulate (script?) a Windows shutdown to firefox.exe? 
It would help to test without restarting Windows a ton of times.

Comment 4

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Steven, any ideas of what's going on here and/or what might have changed after 28?

Comment 5

[richard.berger]

fyi: I didn't test with version 29. I upgraded directly from version 28 to 31.

Comment 6

[Steven MacLeod [:smacleod]]

Off the top of my head I don't know of a particular change that would be causing this to fail now.

I wonder if the SessionCheckpoints.json write isn't finishing in this case, even though session.js is, so we think we crashed? So maybe the CrashMonitor is involved?

Tim / David, any thoughts on what could have changed?

Comment 7

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

We introduced the crash monitor with bug 888373 in Firefox 29 iirc. I have no idea about the Windows shutdown process but as you said, maybe only writing sessionCheckpoints.json fails or doesn't complete fast enough.

If Windows just kills processes when shutting down then that's a problem and we couldn't do much about it. If it however sends a signal we might try hooking onto that and see what we can do here. It would help to reproduce and get a snapshot of what we managed to write to disk before shutdown.

Comment 8

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Richard, next time you need to reboot, can you check whether you have a file called sessionCheckpoints.json in your profile directory and, if so, attach it to this bug? It doesn't contain any private information.

Comment 9

[richard.berger]

Hello,

I think I could identify the problem I had. To speed up firefox first start after a reboot, I had a shortcut to "firefox.exe -silent" in my autorun. I read about it here: https://support.mozilla.org/de/questions/762446

After disabling the shortcut, the problem was gone. To cross check I activated it again and nothing happens for a few boots. Than the problem returned on every boot.

For now I disabled the shortcut. Unfortunately, firefox now needs nearly 30 seconds for its first start after a reboot.

Comment 10

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Good catch. Cc-ing Robert, who wrote the code for "-silent".

Comment 11

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

I didn't implement silent... all I added was the handler in nsBrowserContentHandler.js back in 2006. As bug 324023 comment #3 states, back then xpfe still handled -silent but toolkit apps didn't even though we still set the reg values on win32 to use -silent for the same purpose.

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Richard, do you still see this problem?

Comment 13

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Unclear if this is still an issue, and there's been lots of code changes since this was reported. No recent activity, so I'll close as incomplete. Please re-open if this is still an issue and provide what details you can.