1645161 - reopen my tabs that I had open, AND clear history when I close and reopen Firefox

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1022231

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:77.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/77.0

Steps to reproduce:

well described here:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1215378

Quoting from that:

"I have several tabs that I have open on a regular basis that I use. I also have the option to clear browsing history when exiting Firefox checked. If Firefox crashes or I kill it with TaskManager, it will restore the tabs (and keeps history) but if I exit properly, it will not reopen the tabs even though I have the option 'Show your windows and tabs from last time' checked."

Actual results:

Tabs not restored after regular quit

Expected results:

1. Tabs restored on relaunch
2. Tab cleared from history when it's manually closed.

Reasonable people might disagree as to whether this is a bug or an RFE, though I'll suggest it's a bug since the "Show your windows and tabs from last time" checkbox is non-functional but not disabled.

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

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

Having just happened to me again. I think this is quite severe. It is a data loss bug.

The list of open tabs and the browser history are two different things, at least from the user's perspective. History is where I've been. Open tabs are where I am now and are not conceptually part of history. Firefox provides separate UI widgets and separate preferences to control these two different concepts.

Yet somewhere under the hood they seem to get conflated, and a preference that is supposed to apply to one can cause data loss in the other.

Comment 4

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

And just to be clear, this is still an issue in 78.0.2

Comment 5

[Nicolas Dietrich [:nidi]]

I think this is a duplicate of bug 1022231. Still, Elliotte's comment in this bug (here) that "list of open tabs and the browser history are two different things, at least from the user's perspective" is relevant.

Comment 6

[Nicolas Dietrich [:nidi]]

Or actually both are rather a duplicate of bug 505548, they're all the same and only one should be kept open in order to save reporters hassle.

Comment 7

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

This bug is not a duplicate of bug 505548. That bug requests a warning when both preferences are selected. This bug suggests respecting both preferences. Personally I'd won't fix 505548. A dialog box to alert the user that their explicit preferences will not be respected is not an adequate substitute for respecting those preferences.