1290500 - "Haven't started Firefox in a while" Refresh prompt shows up while running Firefox

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1054947

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Verdi [:verdi] Best to slack me]

Attachment: file.jpeg

My wife had been running Firefox 46.0.1 without restarting for more than two months when the "It looks like you haven't started Firefox in a while" refresh prompt showed up. She had not just restarted Firefox as evidenced by the pending update in the screenshot.

I noticed that bug 1011978 seems very similar though the prompt dismissed with one click and she has not had the prompt show up a second time yet.

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Hmm, at first look this sure seems like this shouldn't happen... The bar is only triggered from one point -- _onFirstWindowLoaded() -- and that's only called from the browser-delayed-startup-finished observer.

But the comments in bug 1011978 are relevant here, browser-delayed-startup-finished can fire multiple times (once per browser window opened), and so if something in _onFirstWindowLoaded() throws  (and there's an increasing amount of code there), the observer never gets removed.

The simple fix would be to do what bug 1011978 comment 11 pondered, which will hopefully avoid this.

OTOH, if something is throwing, it means some portion of initialization won't finish, which could mean a bunch of stuff is uninitialized... This notification bar is just one of many possible symptoms of that happening.

I think we should actually refactor these giant init-conglomeration functions to be more robust to such failings. For example, have a list (or registration API) for things that need to init, and loop over each in a try/catch block. That would contain failures to a particular subsystem, and we could even report that in telemetry for further investigation.

Comment 2

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

Not sure I remember correctly, but I think there were some recent changes regarding when this notification appears. Mike, have you come across a relevant bug by any chance?

Comment 3

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Redirecting to mstriemer who is running point on infobars.

Comment 4

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

Implementation is at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/4606c7974a68cab416c038acaedcae49eed93822/browser/components/BrowserGlue.jsm#1342-1344,1347-1348

The timestamp used for the comparison is not updated during use, so if the user doesn't restart Firefox within 60 days, the notification shows up.

I'm keeping this issue open given its clear description, but note that it has also been mentioned before at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1054947#c11

Linking to bug 1095739 because that introduced this feature (and blame on the relevant code points to that bug).