1201111 - session restore needs to be redesigned

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Aeed]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0
Build ID: 20150902030229

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox froze. No idea what caused the freeze/crash, but several other windows on my computer froze or were unresponsive as well at the time, so I suspect general Windows issue (I'm on Windows 8) not actually Firefox's fault (could be wrong here)

Used task manager to end Firefox task, but it remained unresponsive. Had to ctrl-alt-delete and set the whole PC to reboot. Everything rebooted fine, then I opened Firefox again.


Actual results:

This happened: http://i.imgur.com/ci8wuYO.png

Well naturally, relying on Firefox's session restore meant my 300+ tabs were lost forever. Only way to get a vague impression of what I had open is to spend several hours trawling through history, checking the past 3 - 6 months history of webpages.

Fortunately I had the Tab Mix Plus addon installed. Enabled the addon's custom session restore manager, and one restart of Firefox later, I had all 300+ of my tabs back.


Expected results:

Tab Mix Plus allows you to chose one of several previous sessions if the most recent session appears to be empty.

Firefox's built-in session restore needs something like this. If I hadn't have had Tab Mix Plus installed, I would have been utterly screwed. I recommend a redesign of the built-in session restore so that it allows users to select one of several recent sessions, in case the most recent session is empty or corrupted.

This has been a long-standing issue with Firefox since forever (2.5 had this problem, 3.0 did, 3.5, 3.6, 4.0+, all the way throughout the years until present day, and this problem still persists on all stable, beta, and pre-beta versions of Firefox) Something needs to be done sooner or later to improve session restore's reliability.

Comment 1

[Aeed]

I don't expect all crashes or tab loss of URLs to be resolved, after all, new bugs crop up all the time. However I'd just like to mention here that since I started using Firefox seriously (around 2008) up until one of the latest versions (FF56 if I recall), I've had at least once unrecoverable crash once a year, where I lose all my tab data, and it's impossible to get it back.

The latest crashes this year have been worse than ever, I've constantly lost data and I've finally had enough. I've (temporarily?) moved to another web browser to it as my new primary browser until this issue is fixed. Still keeping FF as secondary though.

So yes, while I don't expect all crashes to be resolved, what I do expect, is a fool-proof, highly resilient procedure built into Firefox, that automatically incrementally backs up your sessions. Upon session restore, if the previous session does not contain the tabs you need, why not roll back to the session before that one? There should be at least 30+ sessions to choose from if the last one is corrupted.

Why did tab mix plus get it right? Why can't such a simple feature be built into Firefox by default? (I can't use tab mix plus' session restore either, it's not fool proof unfortunately, but I have faith that if someone gets serious about addressing this issue, it can be made fool proof) This issue was moved to "Critical" and yet 2 years later here we are still having unrecoverable data loss. I realize I sound slightly salty, but in the last crash, I lost nearly 300 tabs simultaneously and probably days' worth of work.

All you need to do is search "session crash" to see how many unresolved bug reports there are. Data loss is a very serious issue. I hope we can have an ETA for someone to at least be assigned to reworking the session restore system.

Comment 2

[Clara Guerrero ( Need Info Brindusa Tot Please)]

Hi reporter!

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Can you please confirm if the issue has occured in our latest 85 build? If so, could you please kindly provide additional steps to reproduce in our end? (did it mostly happen while having several tabs opened, like 300 in your case?)

Best regards,
Clara

Comment 3

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

Redirect a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user to the triage owner.
:dao, since the bug has high severity, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 4

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

In the process of migrating remaining bugs to the new severity system, the severity for this bug cannot be automatically determined. Please retriage this bug using the new severity system.