1445497 - Many of my open tabs are not being searched (with or without %)

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P5)

Description

[Chris Morgan]

I always have lots of open tabs, so switching to a particular open tab by URL or name is extremely useful.

However, for the last few years (not sure quite how far back), on stable and nightly, Windows and Linux, and across two or three fresh profiles, searches in the address bar have been excluding many of my open tabs.

It’s not just a matter of open tabs being given insufficient weight, for including % makes it only search open tabs, and the tabs still don’t appear.

I have not been able to discern any rhyme or reason for why one tab is searchable and another is not (e.g. was it carried over from a previous session, is it unloaded, is there any pattern in the URL). Switching to a tab seems to commonly but not always render it searchable again.

Just now, I had 100 tabs across two windows, and I conducted a survey of the last twenty in one of those windows: five of them were not accessible via the address bar.

This has been steadily annoying me more and more, and it finally reached the threshold where I filed a bug about it. (Rather sad it took that long, really.)

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Unfortunately this doesn't have enough details for any kind of investigation, and figuring out a way to find STR as as difficult.
As you imagined, we need some steps to make it more reproducible.
At a maximum I may ask which version you are using, on Which OS and your list of add-ons.

Comment 2

[Chris Morgan]

Attachment: Raw troubleshooting information from about:support

I have encountered this on multiple started-from-scratch profiles on at least Arch Linux and Windows 10. Just at present I’m using a profile that was started on Windows but is currently running on Linux.

I strongly doubt that extensions have anything to do with it, for I experienced this before WebExtensions shipped. And certainly WebExtensions *should* be powerless to cause it! Container tabs are not a cause (happened before them, and I see no correlation between which container a tab may happen to be in).

It seems to me much more likely that this issue affects everyone, but that it’s a fairly uncommon usage pattern that leads to it being noticed.

Attached is the raw data from about:support just in case it’s useful anyway.

I’m technically competent and very passingly familiar with various Firefox internals, so I can perform any diagnostics requested.

Comment 3

[Chris Morgan]

I haven’t been rigorous about it, but when today I inspected the state of my Firefox session started yesterday with only 40 tabs (I culled a lot yesterday), and I was able to find six that weren’t being found.

Basically, my steps to reproduce go along the lines of:

1. Have a session with two windows open, each of which has several pinned tabs and at least a dozen more tabs.
2. Methodically search for tabs through the address bar, typing “% [the title of each tab]” for each one.
3. Keep trying until you find tabs that aren’t being searched.

Comment 4

[Chris Morgan]

This bug is still there and still very annoying when working with lots of tabs. ::mak, you haven’t responded since I added my troubleshooting info and suggested steps to reproduce; is there more I can help with?

Comment 5

[Kestrel]

Container tabs can cause this (Bug 1479858) as well as clearing history (Bug 1223712).

Comment 6

[ciprian.tomoiaga]

I am also experiencing this problem.

Not sure for how long it has been occuring, but haven't had a problem with it in the past year since I discovered the % term search trick.

Recently I had a firefox crash though, so I suspect that might have interfered with it.

Another setting that may be of interest is that my Firefox is not loading old tabs until I click on it (on purpose, since I have many open tabs). Maybe that interferes with the search ?

Finally, I'm a heavy user of the Tree-Style tabs extension and I never use tabs with the default tab bar. This could also contribute to the forgetting.
I'd be happy to provide more details to help with debugging. Maybe you can indicate where the Tab databse is ?

Thanks !

Comment 7

[Florencia Di Ciocco, NI to vbalducci]

Hi, I think that this bug is no longer valid in the face of the latest changes on the browser. If I'm mistaken, please reopen it.
Regards, Flor.

Comment 8

[Chris Morgan]

I don’t recall noticing this any time recently, and I can’t reproduce it right now across 78 tabs (except for two tabs to the same URL, only one entry for that), but I’ve been using the feature less often than I used to.

I did, however, observe duplicated entries yesterday (two entries for the one tab, under most substring queries but I think not all), which sounds like the sort of thing that could easily have a common root cause with this, if it’s still a thing. Haven’t filed anything for that, having only seen it once.