1051979 - When Mac user session is reopened, Firefox is not relaunched like all other applications

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 639707

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[André Reinald]

STR:
1. set Firefox to display profile manager
2. launch Firefox, chose profile, continue, wait for Firefox to finish opening
3. in Apple menu, chose Restart
4. after restart, chose same Mac user and type password to reopen the session

Expected result:
Firefox is relaunched like all other applications

Actual result:
All applications are relaunched, except Firefox

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Does this happen when the profile manager is not used by default?

Comment 2

[André Reinald]

No, as stated in bug 996056, this happens when Firefox relaunches itself (fork-exec-exit style), which happens either after an update, or when the profile manager is displayed.

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

ok, probably quite low priority then. In the case of the profile manager, the best way to fix this might be to move the profile selection system not to relaunch (use a selection subprocess). I'm not sure what we can/should do about the restart-for-update case.

Comment 4

[André Reinald]

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg  [:bsmedberg] from comment #3)
> ok, probably quite low priority then. In the case of the profile manager,
> the best way to fix this might be to move the profile selection system not
> to relaunch (use a selection subprocess).

This is what I originally wanted. But the code is old, has many nested "main" functions and methods, and I didn't feel comfortable changing it, nor did I find someone to ask for advice.

> I'm not sure what we can/should do about the restart-for-update case.

In this bug I state a nasty side effect of the way we relaunch Firefox. The fork-exec-exit sequence is typical of a daemon process, which Firefox definitely isn't.

On Mac, the normal way to launch user applications (the one used by the Finder for instance) is to ask the user's launchd to launch a process (and stay its parent) through LaunchServices API. I expect on Linux there's a way to ask the user's initd to do the same. I know nothing about Windows process management.

As the situation may not be so common (again I miss statistics), we may afford a slight performance penalty using a tiny "helper binary" (as mentioned in bug 996056 comment 18), which waits for the 1st instance of Firefox to exit, then uses platform specific calls to launch a new Firefox instance the right way.

Comment 5

[noitidart]

Hi all,
Anyone know exactly how to fix this? It's hitting me hard, for my addon I'm bringing a feature which allows users to create shortcuts to profiles. It works but on restart of profile it spawns new icon, they have to restart it again to merge it to original dock icon: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1130806

Comment 6

[Vlad Lucaci, Thunderbird QA (:vlucaci)]

Hello, 
This issue is still present on our current builds with the exact same repro steps.

Affected builds:
RC 60.0build2
Latest Nightly 05/03/2018
60.0b16

Affected platform:
Mac OSX 10.11.6