1747419 - History of closed windows disappeared

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[jan.rubbrecht]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:95.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/95.0

Steps to reproduce:

I cannot reproduce this problem at will.

It sometimes happens that Firefox doesn't open previous tab but they are usually still in my history so I can open them from there.

Actual results:

Windows 10 Pro x64
Firefox settings: Open previous windows and tabs at startup enabled.

I always have about 10 tabs that reopen but today I only saw a blank new tab when I opened Firefox. It's happened before but no worries, I can go to History -> Recently closed windows and reopen. Today not though, my history of closed windows was completely empty.
I can however still access pages through the general browser history but it takes unnecessary time to find back what I was actually working with.

I didn't even reboot or log out of Windows since the last time I closed Firefox browser.

Expected results:

My browser should've opened with all the browser tabs that were open when it closed.
Firefox's history of recently closed windows should not have been empty.

Comment 1

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Session Restore' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Andrei Purice]

Hey Jan,
I tried reproducing this issue on the latest versions of Firefox Nightly 97.0a1 (2021-12-23), beta 96.0b9 and release 95.0.2 but it doesn't occur for me.

Can you test the issue while in Safe Mode? You can find helpful info here : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode .
A fresh new profile could help. You can find more about creating a new profile here : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-and-diagnose-firefox-problems#w_6-create-a-new-firefox-profile .
If possible, you can test this issue on the nightly build as well. Download the build from : https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/all/ .

Comment 3

[jan.rubbrecht]

Hi Andrei,

Like I said on the original report, I cannot reproduce this at will. I've worked in support as well, I realize how annoying this is to diagnose a problem :(

It sometimes happens (like once a month, sometimes maybe even less) that Firefox opens up with a blank tab instead of all my previous tabs.
Usually it isn't an issue (even though it shouldn't happen), I go back to my history of closed windows and I can get them back easily.

This time though, there was only 1 closed windows that contained 1 tab from maybe about 15 I had open before. I do quite a bit of research and don't always remember what info I see on which website, that's why I find it important that my used tabs are automatically reopened. Browsing every page from your history can take hours to find back what you were looking at before.

In general I don't have any issues with my computer. It's fast, I have >50% disk space available on the system SSD where Firefox is installed, 32GB of ram that usually doesn't exceed 20GB usage, no cooling problems and I can't even remember the last time my computer crashed. Sometimes I do max out my i7 CPU but that's never been an issue before.

Thanks for your suggestions, I will create a new profile but like I said, it doesn't happen every day so it could take a month or 2 before I know this issue really doesn't happen anymore.

Comment 4

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

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

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 5

[jan.rubbrecht]

I'm sure this can be considered a low priority bug ...

Comment 6

[Alexandru Trif, Desktop QA [:atrif]]

Tried to reproduce the issue a few times on Windows 10x64 with Firefox 105.0.3, 106.0 and 107.0a1 (2022-10-12) while having Open previous windows and tabs at startup enabled but I could not reproduce it with any of the Firefox versions listed above. After opening Firefox the expected number of tabs was displayed.

Jan does the issue reproduced for you lately? Thank you!

Comment 7

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

Redirect a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user to the triage owner.
:dao, since the bug has recent activity, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 8

[jan.rubbrecht]

Sorry for not having replied to this earlier.
I moved away from Windows (to Ubuntu - so I cannot say anything about my issues in Windows anymore).
Currently I have no issues with Firefox... thumbs up