1644843 - session restore behaviour for visible tab leads to stale data being shown to the user

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Steve.Hummingbird]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_5) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.1.1 Safari/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

I have received a bug report from a user of our site, who told me that when he starts his computer and launches firefox, which restores its session, he sometimes is presented stale (sometimes multiple days old) data.
I have tried to debug and reproduce this issue and found the following:

When firefox is opened and restores a tab, that is not the active tab, firefox completely reloads the page and executes all javascript.

However, when firefox is opened, the currently visible tab seems to completely be restored from memory. No network request seem to be executed which leads to stale data being displayed.

Actual results:

The currently active tab, when restored, does not reload the page, but seems to serve a copy from memory. I tried to find more information via search engines, but was unable to determine if this is a bug or an actual feature, trying to display the visible tab faster.

Expected results:

If this is an actual feature, is there a recommendation how websites are supposed to handle loading of current data, which works with the firefox session restore mechanism? However, I think it would be vital to handle headers like max-age correctly. Our site responds with 'cache-control: max-age=60', so firefox should never display data which is older than that date.

Comment 1

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

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 2

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

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

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 3

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Canceling needinfo because Mike's account is inactive.