1433026 - 58.0 (x64) - After session restore, new tabs are not tracked/saved

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect, P3)

Description

[achapman092]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0
Build ID: 20180118215408

Steps to reproduce:

First thing when I started Firefox today, it informed me it was installing updates and would launch thereafter. After it started up with the 'Welcome to 58.0' page, I changed the url to go to the "/releasenotes/" page.

After reading about the 'user profile compatibility' changes, I immediately went to the "\sessionstore-backups\" folder on my computer to copy the 'most recent' files (I'm a software & web developer with a habit of keeping a lot of tabs open at once -- ~50-100 tabs spanning 2-5 windows at a time). I know..chaotic craziness. So I can't afford to lose what I have and call me paranoid, but I keep frequent backups of everything. Well, I never close Firefox the "normal" way, b/c of the numerous issues I've had in the past with session/tab restores NOT being triggered following a normal shutdown (regardless of my preference to "Show your windows & tabs from last time"). I ALWAYS trigger a crash by forcing the parent process to terminate. Regardless of how you may feel about this method, it's always served me right in the past. With that said, I did the same today; forced a crash, and left for a while.

---Stage 1--- (I'm using this as a marker for later in the bug report - I have a QA background, don't judge me...)
When I came back later in the day to open Firefox again, the "Restore Session" page came up as normal and I noticed that it DID track the url change I made originally. So I clicked "Restore Session".

At this point I had 2 tabs open in 1 window,
1 - The "nested" restore session tab (which 'should' have all of my tabs PRIOR to 58.0)
2 - The 58.0 release notes page

Thinking everything was normal, I went to the first tab, clicked "Restore Session" again, it restored my last session with all of my 'pre-58.0' tabs successfully.

This left me with 2 open windows,
1 - a window containing all previous tabs
2 - a new window containing the release notes page

I navigated around as usual (on the 2nd window), opened about 4-5 new tabs, etc.

However, after around 20 mins of browsing, I looked over at my other screen (I have dual monitors), which still had my '\sessionstore-backups\' folder open, and I noticed the timestamps for both files: 'recovery.baklz4' and 'recovery.jsonlz4' had NOT changed since I clicked on "Restore Session" the last time.

To test this, I terminated the parent process as usual, and reopened Firefox once more. When it opened this time, I was back to Stage 1 above. I had a restore session page, and upon clicking restore session, it brought me back to the same state I was in (2 tabs in 1 window), immediately after upgrading to 58.0. I lost the 4-5 new tabs I had opened.

As icing on the cake, to test my theory, instead of restoring my 'pre-58.0' tabs, this time, I decided to open a new tab next to the release notes tab. This left me with 3 open tabs, 1 - restore session, 2 - release notes, and 3 - google.com, and on my other monitor, I watched the timestamp get updated almost immediately. So then I clicked on the first tab, restored my 'pre-58' session for a final time, then opened a 4th tab and navigated to stackoverflow.com, and the timestamps for both files stayed the same...


Actual results:

New session changes on 58.0 made AFTER restoring your 'pre-58.0' session, are not tracked/updated in the sessionstore. Including new windows, new tabs, url changes, current/selected tab changes, etc... All 'new' session changes will be lost if you restore your pre-58.0 sessions and then close Firefox by:
1) invoking a crash, or
2) closing Firefox the 'normal' way - WITH the preference "Show your windows & tabs from last time"

What ends up happening IMMEDIATELY after restoring the old session, is the internal session-manager so to speak, stops updating the .jsonlz4/.baklz4 recovery files. This can be tracked using Process Hacker and watching the "Disk" tab. The handle(s) to those files is closed and all I/O operations stop with regard to the "\sessionstore-backups\" folder.


Expected results:

It should have restored all previous windows & tabs from ~57.x AND continued tracking new changes to your windows and tabs in the current session.

Comment 1

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

Hi achapman, thanks for the concise bug report! I can't reproduce the issue you reported, but the symptoms are familiar; there have been issues in the past where the process that writes/ updates these recovery and backup files could become stalled/ corrupted and we didn't restart it properly.
Now we do, so I'd like to ask you to retry this with a newer version of Firefox and see if this issue remains!

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Reporter seems to be gone