1978084 - Firefox keep loosing my data - deleted pins and open tabs

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect, P2)

Description

[Bartłomiej Wójtowicz]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/140.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. I closed the browser.
2. I opened the brwoser.

happened multiple times already (twice on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and once on OSX)

Actual results:

I had 8 pins in vertical tabs that I regulary use and multiple open tabs that I had for "read later" scenario. After opening the browser all gone, no tabs, no pins.

Expected results:

I should see my saved data.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Could you please tell us more on how you normally close the browser?

Comment 3

[Bartłomiej Wójtowicz]

Nothing special, I use browser normally, usually I open it once per PC/notebook boot and don't close it until very end (pressing X button, then shutting down the PC or closing the notebook lid or I will use the shortcut Cmd/Ctrl+Q (OSX/Linux)).
Maybe one thing that I should mention that might be important to you is that I am very keyboard oriented person and by accident I tend to press Ctrl+Q with the intent of closing other window without noticing that I have FF focused, then my browser will shutdown and then I would quickly reopen it - I think that was one of the trigger that happened to delete my pins and tabs (quick reopening).

Second scenario that happened might be related to what I reported as well:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1978087
TLDR, sometimes pages won't load (my tabs/pins) and they are in infinite loading state - normally I would close the FF and then reopen it again - I think that was the other trigger that cause data loss.

Now when I think about it - in all my cases immediate reopening after closing the browser caused the same issue. Please note that in case of FF not loading pages I might have repeated the close/open procedure few times in a row until it started loading so maybe some concurrent file operations on session data deletes it - don't know that was just my guess, I will leave it to you to examine that.

And that's all the details I have, hope that's enough, if I can help in some way, let me know.

PS:
I didn't use any dangerous commands like kill etc.
I also use Firefox Multi-Container extension if that matters to you.

Comment 4

[Bartłomiej Wójtowicz]

Happened today again.
Scenario to reproduce:

1. One day before I finished my work on notebook (macbook, osx), I closed the browser and then closed the notebook lid.
2. Next day I opened notebook and started a browser, all tabs and pins gone.

Comment 5

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

Its possible Firefox isn't finished gathering and writing the session to disk when you close the laptop lid and when it starts up it doesn't find a session to restore. Can you see if any recent log files have been created and if so attach them here? If they exist they should be in a a sessionstore-logs directory in your profile directory (the location is linked in the about:support page).

Comment 6

[Bartłomiej Wójtowicz]

Sorry, couldn't find the option you are saying (both osx and ubuntu lacks sessionstore-logs directory option), tried to find anything similar but no luck. Today another data loss happened:

1. Booted the PC (ubuntu)
2. Opened browser
3. Browser did not load for a very long time
4. I closed it on x button
5. Waited 5seconds
6. Opened again, nothing happend
7. After few more seconds I had a popup that another instasnce is running
8. Closed the popup and waited few more seconds
9. Tried opening again, same popup
10. I repated the process and browser eventually opened but UI was totally broken (toolbar did not render), all pages and pins were there but they were pointing to about:blank)
11. I couldn't click on anything so I closed the browser normally
12. It crashed (I think I sent crash report)
13. I opened browser
14. Data is gone

What suprises me is why the browser takes so much time closing on a modern PC (I have no hardware failures, fast NVMe drive) - are there any other processes that also happen there that might cause such a delay?
Would you be able to point me in places in the code when this happens? I am just curious about it and how it works

Comment 7

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

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

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 8

[Sarah Clements [:sclements]]

Bartlomiej, Sam was asking for you to check the logs in your Firefox profile directory. There should be a "sessionstore-logs" directory. You need to get the exact path by typing "about:profiles" in the urlbar, and then you can see the path for the profile you've been experiencing this problem with. There is nothing personal or identifying in the session restore logs btw.

Can you confirm you currently have "Open previous windows and tabs" selected in about:preferences? How many tabs are you typically working with?

One point to make about how you are quitting the browser. Closing the 'x' button technically is just closing the window, even if its the only (or last window). It should technically show pinned tabs in there, unless you happened to close a window with no pinned tabs most recently, see bug 587400.

If the next time you close using the x button and lose your tabs, can you check if you can still retrieve them by going to History -> Recently Closed Windows -> to reopen any windows from your previous session?

Comment 9

[Bartłomiej Wójtowicz]

Hi,

about:profiles points me to ~/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox/oahsi0no.default - there is no sessionstore-logs directory, only:
sessionCheckpoints.json and sessionstore-backups/ directory.

Yes, I have this option turned on. Usually I have ~8-10 pins (now I have 3 as I didn't have time to re-setup them after latest data loss). For the tabs it varies, when this error happened I only had 3 tabs if I recall correctly, sometimes I might have more even 20, but that's rare.

I only use 1 window. Occasionally I may use two but I close them in correct order, if not - I know that's on me :)

"Recently closed windows" - I always tried that but no success.