1682537 - Tab session is gone again

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[jonzn4SUSE]

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1677090 +++

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:83.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/83.0

Steps to reproduce:

The computer that I'm logged into is not showing the sync tab so that I can recover the lost tabs.

Actual results:

Here are the screenshots of the issue.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1312258

The laptop ZBook 17 G2 dual boots Win7 and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Win7 machine name is - ZBook-17-G2
Tumbleweed machine name is - ZBook-17-G2-Tumbleweed

I have lost my tabs several times in openSUSE Tumbleweed

Expected results:

When I go to the View Synced Tab Sidebar to look for ZBook-17-G2-Tumbleweed it's not there, but if I log into Win7 I can see the machine name ZBook-17-G2-Tumbleweed.

It appears to me that no matter what machine I log into, that machine name is not seen in the sync tab, I have to log onto another machine to see the machine that I'm looking for.

Comment 1

[jonzn4SUSE]

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1312258

I logged in the morning and the tabs are gone again.

Comment 2

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

(Commenting for context for session-restore folks when triaging this bug)

As I said in Bug 1677090, the described behavior of Sync here is working as expected - the "synced tabs" functionality is for seeing the tabs from your other devices, not for restoring previous tab state on the current device. The underlying issue here seems to be with Firefox not preserving open tabs across restarts in the way the user expects. Unfortunately I don't know enough about how the local session restore/management functionality works to comment further.

Comment 3

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

jonzn4SUSE, when you say "Tab session is gone", what do you see in their place? Is it a new blank tab, some sort of "we failed to restore your previous session" error page, or something else?

I can see can argument that if Firefox knows it has lost your previous session, it could give you an option to try recovering those tabs from Sync rather than starting over with an empty session. This would be very neat! But it would be new functionality specific to session restore, not part of the "synced tabs" UI.

Comment 4

[jonzn4SUSE]

The browser opens with just the default start page for openSUSE which is the search page. All 30+ tabs that were there just the night before are gone. Again, my issue with Sync is that it just runs like a mindless program. If Sync just gave 1 prompt asking to proceed or not I could have recovered my tabs from another computer.

Comment 5

[jonzn4SUSE]

As you can see from the forum post this issue keeps happening on Tumbleweed. Every few weeks I open my browser and all the previous tabs are gone.

Comment 6

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

If Sync just gave 1 prompt asking to proceed or not

I understand, but I also believe that the vast majority of users would find such a prompt annoying the vast majority of the time, and would receive no benefit from it.

I could have recovered my tabs from another computer.

In the linked support article, you mention that Firefox is prompting for the primary password on every startup. I expect that this prompt is being triggered by Sync, which stores its encryption keys protected by the primary password. If you cancel this prompt, I expect it would prevent sync from running and would allow you the opportunity to recover the synced tabs from another computer.

Comment 7

[jonzn4SUSE]

The sync took place within minutes of me logging in the laptop and I thought of trying to recover my tabs from another computer that was not online, but noticed that the account is not active until online. I logged into my Win10 laptop, opened the sync tab, but the process had already run and my Win10 laptop was only showing 3 tabs for my Tumbleweed computer. I don't rely on sync anymore which is why I bookmark my tabs now because Firefox clearly has session issues.

The prompts for the master password after just clearly my cache on Linux is new. Let me clear my browser cache on Win 10 and see if I get a prompt for the primary password.

Comment 8

[jonzn4SUSE]

Nope. No prompt on Win 10 for the primary password at all. Interesting...

Comment 9

[jonzn4SUSE]

I get no prompt on Win10 even after closing and reopening the browser, but as soon as I open Firefox on Tumbleweed I get a prompt for the password.

Comment 10

[jonzn4SUSE]

Attachment: Tabs gone again_Screenshot_20201217_184920.jpeg

Tabs gone again... ;-))
All I can do is laugh.