1891398 - Starting a private window from windowless state restores the last closed tab

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1877604

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect, P2)

Description

[7dare]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:124.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/124.0

Steps to reproduce:

Ensure the option to restore previous tabs on startup is turned off.

Start a window, browse to some address, close it using Ctrl+W (closing Firefox entirely).

Next, run "firefox --private-window" to start only a private window, browse to some address.

Finally, press Ctrl+N to start a new non-private window.

Actual results:

The new non-private window will contain as a first tab whichever tab you closed last.

The tab is an "unloaded" state, i.e. it will only load the webpage if you navigate to it.

Expected results:

This behavior is unexpected, undocumented, and undesired (potential privacy issue if the user deleted said tab from history).

Comment 1

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Private Browsing' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Sam Foster [:sfoster] (he/him)]

I was able to reproduce this, thanks for the detailed steps.

Comment 3

[7dare]

This can additionally be reproduced when several tabs are open in the non-private window, and it will still restore them even if you delete the pages from history (by doing Ctrl+H then right-clicking their entries and deleting them).

This seems like a big privacy concern, users asking for the state of the browser being forgotten don't expect this behavior from the browser.

Comment 4

[kanapa1]

This looks like a duplicate of bug 1877604 to me.

Comment 5

[7dare]

This is indeed a duplicate, my bad.