1950960 - Tabs do not restore after restarting Firefox

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect, P3)

Description

[Greg Hess]

After closing and restarting Fx137.0a1 my open tabs are not restored, 100% repro on Mac OS.

Steps:

• Launch Firefox Nightly, open multiple tabs (gmail, calendar, bugzilla)
• Close Firefox Nightly
• Launch Firefox Nightly

Results:

Firefox opens and does not restore previously opened tabs.

Expected:

Firefox open and restores open tabs.

Comment 1

[Joe Walker [:jwalker]]

I had something similar, although it was a one-off, possibly unconnected

Restart Firefox to update. I switched to another app, decided to quit that app with ⌘Q, however Firefox came back at just the wrong time, so I ended up quitting Firefox mid-restart.
On re-restarting, all my tabs were gone. However the rest of my profile (extensions, history, etc) seems fine.

Comment 2

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

(In reply to Greg Hess from comment #0)

After closing and restarting Fx137.0a1 my open tabs are not restored, 100% repro on Mac OS. >

Can you attach the output from loading about:support here? Restoring your session (which includes your open tabs) is a setting normally enabled in the Settings page ("Open previous windows and tabs"), but the underlying preference value for that setting will also be sync'd between other desktop Firefox profiles if you have Sync enabled. The contents of about:support will help rule out these preferences as the cause of the issue.

If the feature remains enabled, as is presumably the case with you :jwalker, please attach any recent session restore logs from your profile directory, which - if they exist - should be in a a sessionstore-logs directory in your profile directory (the location is linked in the about:support page)
To get more verbose logging, set browser.sessionstore.log.appender.file.logOnSuccess to true in about:config, and browser.sessionstore.loglevel to Debug (this is the default in Nightly). That should capture more detail (but no tab URls or other personal information) if the issue happens again.

Comment 3

[Joe Walker [:jwalker]]

Attachment: sessionrestore-logs-jwalker.zip

All the files from sessionstore-logs from yesterday, post "event" but after I'd restarted a few times.

Comment 4

[Greg Hess]

Attachment: about-support-ghess.png

Sorry for late reply, please find attached the output of about:support. I can confirm I have "Open previous windows and tabs" enabled.

Thank you.

Comment 5

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Sam, anything obvious jumping out at you in the logs or about:support output?

Comment 6

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

(In reply to Greg Hess from comment #4)

Sorry for late reply, please find attached the output of about:support. I can confirm I have "Open previous windows and tabs" enabled.

Thanks. Nothing much jumps out here except to confirm that session restore ("Open previous windows and tabs") is indeed enabled (value of 3) and sync is enabled. We don't capture a history of pref changes, so its possible session restore was previously disabled and then re-enabled. But there's not much to go on here. Greg, if this keeps happening would you be able to change the prefs I mentioned in comment #2 and attach the session store log files?

From jwalker's log files I can only confirm that session restore is now apparently working well and restoring tabs etc. But there's no indication of what the earlier issue was. This is another case where we need bug 1903112.

I know this is frustrating, but there's nothing actionable here. Enabling the more verbose logging prefs should give us a bit more to work with if it does happen again. Confirming the value of the session restore pref (browser.startup.page) at the time of the problem helps eliminate an unexpectedly sync'd pref change as the cause.

Finally, there is a plan to make it easier to list and restore backup sessions in bug 1873249 which should give affected users more tools to recover from session loss.