1452247 - Recovered tabs won't display and the tab history can't be navigated if the recovery file tabs entries are missing the triggeringPrincipal_base64 property.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1448309

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[poddo]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0
Build ID: 20180323154952

Steps to reproduce:

A lot of old tabs that did not recover normally after the upgrade to 59.  The recovery.jsonlz4 file revealed that the entities for the non working tabs were missing properties that were present the entries for the working tabs.  Deleting the triggeringPrincipal_base64 tag reproduced the problem.

Assuming Firefox is setup to recover last session and was closed with two tabs open, it can be reproduced by:
1. Decompress recovery.jsonlz4 file to recovery.js
2. Edit the recovery.js JSON file by removing the triggeringPrincipal_base64 property for the second tabs entries.  
3. Force Firefox to use the uncompressed recovery.js by deleting compressed session files (recovery.jsonlz4, previous.jsonlz4, sessionstore.jsonlz4)
4. Open Firefox, the second tab should display blank


Actual results:

The second tab displayed as blank.  It also returns to normal after restoring the triggeringPrincipal_base64 property.

I used a simple python script to add triggeringPrincipal_base64 and principalToInherit_base64 to tab entries/childern that were missing the triggeringPrincipal_base64 parameter.  Since the triggeringPrincipal_base64 parameter needs to have a valid value, the script just copied the latest values found, which seems to work.  I was able to recover all my tabs.


Expected results:

I don't know what triggeringPrincipal_base64 does and if it's really necessary to restore a session.  It would be good if Firefox could recreate missing recovery file parameters.

Comment 1

[Ciprian Muresan [:cmuresan], Ecosystem QA, OOO until the 30th of Oct needinfo @mcoman or @poiegas]

I think it's also important to find out how you got in a situation where your tabs did not recover. Poddo, could you please give us some more information about what you were doing before upgrading? Also, could you please post the contents of your about:support page?
Did you upgrade from 58 to 59 or an even older version? Were you using any session add-ons, or add-ons in general?

Comment 2

[poddo]

Attachment: about:support text

about:support text after opening backed up profile (from 58) in 59.

Comment 3

[poddo]

I noticed the tab issue after updating from 58 to 59.

Comment 4

[Dale Harvey (:daleharvey)]

Yup this looks like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1448309, marking as dupe