1088721 - Session restore bug: sometimes a tab goes to the previous page after restoring

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1044556

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Profile Handling, defect)

Description

[fl0]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0
Build ID: 20141020184313

Steps to reproduce:

I use the last beta version of FF for android but his bug is not new at all.
Sometimes, probably after reboot of the app but I'm not sure, some tabs are set to the previous page visited and not to the last page I were the last time I used them.



Actual results:

When I open the tab: the previous page loads, the next button is in the 'click-able' style but it does anything, and even if go manually to the next page by clicking the link again, the next time the page would be probably gone back to the previous one.
This won't be solved until I open the page into a new tab. (and close the buggy one)


Expected results:

I don't really understand why a particular tab have this bug, and I hope this can be solved.
May be it could be useful to use the session system of Firefox for PC as efforts are put into making it more reliable and more usable (#906076) but I don't know if this is even feasible or a good choice.

Comment 1

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

I wonder if this is because session restore doesn't save the state quickly enough after a change of state. I have seen similar issues where I open Firefox, close a bunch of tabs, then close Firefox, only to have those tabs return when I re-open Firefox. I'm not sure if Gecko is fully loaded by the time Firefox is closed, but I think I've seen it loading pages by the time I close Firefox.

Brian, any thoughts?

Comment 2

[fl0]

I think the most interesting part is the 'frozen' state of the tab.

Do you have any thoughts on using the same system as FF for PCs ?

Comment 3

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

(In reply to fl0 from comment #2)
> I think the most interesting part is the 'frozen' state of the tab.

What do you mean by the "frozen" state of the tab?

> Do you have any thoughts on using the same system as FF for PCs ?

(Disclaimer: I've never changed this code before so I'm intuiting from the code I've seen and people I've spoken to) I believe we do use the same underlying system as FF for PCs - we get this for free from the shared platform (called Gecko). However, in order to get the information into the platform, we need to pass messages from the Android front-end. I *think* what is happening here is that the tab state messages, which are sent and received asynchronously, are not read and saved by the platform because 1) the platform hasn't fininshed loading yet (e.g. my comment 1) or 2) the platform did not have enough time to save the state to disk.

I think Brian would know better here though.

Comment 4

[fl0]

(In reply to Michael Comella (:mcomella) from comment #3)
> (In reply to fl0 from comment #2)
> > I think the most interesting part is the 'frozen' state of the tab.
> 
> What do you mean by the "frozen" state of the tab?
As I explained in the description it's a weird behaviour 
>>When I open the tab: the previous page loads, the next button is in the 'click-able' style but it does
>>anything, and even if go manually to the next page by clicking the link again, the next time the page 
>>would be probably gone back to the previous one.
I don't know why it acts like that so it's not easily reproducible I found this interesting because it means that the change of page was saved somehow but not completely

I probably know even less about it but I was told "Firefox for Android is using something entirely different, so this change doesn’t apply." when I asked about change in session restore here https://dutherenverseauborddelatable.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/firefox-the-browser-that-has-your-backup/#comments
This is probably the case as I've completely lost my tabs recently on android. (or the changes haven't made it yet into FF for android)

Comment 5

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

(In reply to fl0 from comment #4)
> I probably know even less about it but I was told "Firefox for Android is
> using something entirely different, so this change doesn’t apply." when I
> asked about change in session restore here

That post may be right so I don't think I can really talk here - I think Brian is the one to ask. I'll poke him to respond to this.

Comment 6

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

NI self to ensure I get Brian (or someone) to respond to this.

Comment 7

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

Some initial questions:
* Are you doing anything special to close Firefox? For example, do you ever swipe Firefox out of the "recent apps" list on your phone?
* Do you know if you have any task killers installed?

Comment 8

[fl0]

I do sometimes swipe Firefox out of the recent apps however it's quite unusual.
I don't use any task killer.
However I use a lot of tabs (hence my interest in virtual tabs and improved session restore also on Android) and it can cause my FF to somehow reboot (restart with all tabs unloaded) when my phone probably run out of ram when using another hungry app.
As I said it's not a something I experience frequently but I have seen it a few times.