1709107 - "Restore Previous Session" is missing from the History menu

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

"Restore Previous Session" is missing from the History menu.

Current Nightly, Linux, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Using a clean profile, it does show up, greyed out. But it's totally missing in my normal profile.

Comment 1

[Travis Long [:travis_]]

I seem to be affected by this also:

Current Nightly, MacOS 11.3

I haven't tested with a clean profile, but I do not see this in either the app menu or the hamburger menus anymore. I noticed this last week when I updated to Big Sur and needed to restore my session, fortunately opening the recently closed window saved me.

Comment 2

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Flipping "Restore previous session" in General settings has no effect.

(I did not test restarting with this flipped, as that would be potentially dataloss...)

Comment 3

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1692176#c6 suggests this might be hidden intentionally, but that seems inconsistent with the behavior in a new profile where it is greyed out.

Comment 4

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

The primary issue here is I think that it's hidden even when there should be things to restore.

Related: Hiding it when there's nothing to restore (if that's what's happening) is confusing (in my opinion), since someone who's looking for it in it's 'normal' place will have no idea why it's not there. Also, another developer lost all their tabs when updating today, and was confused by it not being available (even if disabled). He was lucky that someone told him he could use meta-shift-n (reopen most recently closed window) and he got them back.

I use this (in some of my test profiles) at least once a day. I suspect that some users who don't want to always restore tabs/windows use it whenever they do want to continue from the last session; when they accidentally close the browser, etc.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This is not really actionable without steps to reproduce. The item is intentionally hidden when we've already restored your session (can't restore it twice!), which I expect explains both Jesup's and :gcp's cases. Enabling/disabling automatic session restore at that point would no longer make a difference - we will still have overwritten your last session with the new session that you're currently in, and can't restore it again.

In particular, the hidden state depends directly on SessionStore.canRestoreLastSession ( https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/185ab5e4f4e01341e009cd4633d1275ffe4d4c8b/browser/components/customizableui/CustomizableWidgets.jsm#144 ). Unless there is a case where the history subview item in the hamburger menu does not have it and the menubar menu does (and it's enabled there), this is a session restore bug, not a proton bug, and needs to be triaged there. Given that nobody seems to be reporting that, and we use the same condition in the main menuitem (though additionally disabling it in private windows!), moving accordingly.

Comment 6

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

From looking a bit through the code, I guess the logic is:

a) There is no session to restore: menu item exists but is greyed out.
b) There was a session, and we already restored it: menu item is hidden.

Which is why an empty profile behaves differently from our regular ones.