1554974 - Closing the main, non-private, Firefox window while a private browsing window is still open, clears the main window's stored session

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect, P3)

Description

[Stig OK]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:66.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/66.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. In settings, enable "Restore session" on Firefox startup
2. Open a couple of windows you will expect to be stored when closing Firefox
3. Open a private Firefox window instance
4. Close the main non-private instance of Firefox
5. Open Firefox normally again

Actual results:

The non-private instance of Firefox starts up again with a new session. The windows from the old session are lost.

Expected results:

The session that was both created and stored in a non-private Firefox instance should have been restored regardless of the user having an open instance of private browsing or not while exiting.

Comment 1

[Stig OK]

Related to Bug 1435594, but it did, in my opinion, get the wrong impression of it being a feature request. Hopefully, this report is more accurate.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The priority flag is not set for this bug.
:mikedeboer, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 3

[maheshmurali00x]

why this bug is still unconfirmed?
I have the same problem and the steps to reproduce is clear.

Comment 4

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

Does this also happen when you open and close a private window from an existing Firefox instance (Ctrl+Shift+P)?

Comment 5

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

Also, I can't reproduce this no Mac, so the behavior is not the same on each platform. I'd be very interested in learning if this issue can be reproduced on Windows as well.

Comment 6

[Stig OK]

(In reply to Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer] from comment #4)

Does this also happen when you open and close a private window from an existing Firefox instance (Ctrl+Shift+P)?

I can confirm that this also happens with Ctrl+Shift+P, in addition to when starting a new private instance running firefox --private-window from the command line.

Comment 7

[jura]

Same problem here on multiple devices, I have opened main window with multiple tabs to reopen them once I start firefox. Then I open anonymous windows so that I do not lose all those tabs in main session. From time to time if I forget and close main window first, I lose all the main window tabs and more importantly also lose session backup, I am unable to restore all the opened tabs which is another issue I guess. Happens for a couple years now. It is really a problematic if you lose all the work in progress and there is no way to get it back.