1238397 - Private Tabs are not part of session restore (?)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Platform differentiation here:

iOS - we restore private tabs (if you toggle the setting to restore tabs; why is that even off by default?!)

Android - we kill all your private tabs

On Android, why are we killing all of our private tabs?

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

(In reply to Aaron Train [:aaronmt] from comment #0)
> Platform differentiation here:
> 
> iOS - we restore private tabs (if you toggle the setting to restore tabs;
> why is that even off by default?!)

Whoops, meant Android for that parenthesis comment

Comment 2

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

re: pref switch, yay bug 1219343

Comment 3

[:Margaret Leibovic]

We do have code to restore private tabs when we're OOM killed. Is that working? We should renom this if there's a bug with that logic.

We don't write your private tabs to disk, so there's no way for us to restore them unless Android gives us bundle with the tabs in them.

How is iOS doing this?

Comment 4

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to :Margaret Leibovic from comment #3)
> We do have code to restore private tabs when we're OOM killed. Is that
> working? We should renom this if there's a bug with that logic.
> 
> We don't write your private tabs to disk, so there's no way for us to
> restore them unless Android gives us bundle with the tabs in them.
> 
> How is iOS doing this?

Correct. Saving private tabs to disk violates the "private browsing" policy.

Comment 5

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Seems to be working as designed:
1. Open a private tab and visit some URL.
2. Background Firefox.
3. |adb shell am kill <firefox package name>|
4. Look at "Running services" in Android's developer option's to verify that Firefox has indeed been killed.
5. Start Firefox again.
6. The private tab is restored.

If on the other hand Firefox has e.g. been killed by swiping away in the task switcher, then we don't get a saved data bundle from the OS and the private tabs aren't restored.