1172808 - Restore previous session does not restore multiple windows anymore

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Maarten Deen]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20150525141253

Steps to reproduce:

I have two firefox windows (not tabs) open. I close both. Then I open Firefox again and use "restore previous session".


Actual results:

Only the tabs from the last windows closed are restored.


Expected results:

All tabs from all windows that I closed should reappear. This was the behaviour up to a few versions ago: closing two windows, restarting firefox and selecting "restore previous session" would restore the tabs of one window in the current window and would open a new window to restore the tabs of the second window.

Comment 1

[Maarten Deen]

I don't see an edit option, so I put this correction here:


> Only the tabs from the last windows closed are restored.

needs to be 

> Only the tabs from the last window closed are restored.

Comment 2

[David Hedlund]

I've lost important links from dozens of important tabs open that later were lost when I opened an additional window with a few tabs, and then closed Firefox, and opened it to discover only the most recent window restored. And I could not find the links easily, so this bug may cause serious loss of productivity in my opinion. It should have been fixed years 7 years ago, Firefox is really great, so please prioritize fixing this.

Comment 3

[David Hedlund]

A workaround to re-open closed windows is to hit: Ctrl+Shift N -- but most people don't know or remember this.

Comment 4

[David Hedlund]

This feature request is a useful measure to be able to restore closed windows:

Add undo close window feature - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=394759

Comment 5

[David Hedlund]

(In reply to David Hedlund from comment #4)

This feature request is a useful measure to be able to restore closed windows:

Add undo close window feature - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=394759
Sorry, that was for Ctrl+Shift+N which has been fixed.

I could not find my issue listed, so I started: Add "File: Reopen Closed Window" - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1751534

Comment 6

[David Hedlund]

Another workaround until this has been fixed: If your browser crashes with a New Private Window the tabs will be lost, but the tabs in your other window will be kept. It is easy to distinguish Private Windows from the normal window, so they may be used for tab links that you don't have to remember, while the normal window should be used for browsing of websites that you may wish to copy links for later.

Comment 7

[David Hedlund]

(In reply to David Hedlund from comment #6)

Another workaround until this has been fixed: If your browser crashes with a New Private Window the tabs will be lost, but the tabs in your other window will be kept. It is easy to distinguish Private Windows from the normal window, so they may be used for tab links that you don't have to remember, while the normal window should be used for browsing of websites that you may wish to copy links for later.

Sorry, this workaround is not needed at all, because there's a menu entry for this:

From https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1751534#c7:

The menu is already available in History (both main menu and hamburger menu), for both tabs and windows, right above the Restore Previous Session that you can see in this image. Duplicating it in one more place is not going to make it more discoverable.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-restore-my-tabs-last-time#w_restore-the-previous-session-from-the-firefox-menu

Comment 8

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug has a release status flag that shows some version of Firefox is affected, thus it will be considered confirmed.