1985619 - firefox forgets open tabs depending on window close order

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Session Restore, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Jim Garrison]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:142.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/142.0

Steps to reproduce:

This is a longstanding usability "bug"

1. Open Firefox, navigate around, open a bunch of tabs, pin some tabs, etc -- this is your "main" window with all the stuff you're using at the moment.
2. Drag one of those tabs to the desktop to create a new window (or just open a new Firefox window)
3. Decide you need to reboot (or close Firefox for any reason) -- forget you have two windows open; close the main window.
4. Close the secondary window.
5. Re-launch Firefox.

Actual results:

The "secondary" window is restored -- all the tabs that were in your "main" window are now "gone".

Expected results:

When multiple windows were closed, there should be a startup option to decide which window to reopen, and that UI should provide enough information to allow the user to select the desired window.

Yes, I did find the "History/Recently Closed Windows" function, but the UI there shows only the title of each window's most recently active tab. It's not at all clear that that's going to reopen the window with all the tabs, and the single tab title might not be enough to select the correct window.

At the very least, the UI for reopening closed windows should show the number of tabs in each window to give the user a better chance of choosing the right window the first time.

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 correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Jeremy Swinarton]

Hi Jim, thanks for this report. We agree that this workflow isn't ideal, and we'd like to find a way to improve it.

Ideally, we would explore adding a new menu on startup that helps make the user's life a little easier. It's unlikely we'll have time to add something like this in the short term, but we discussed a potential quick fix in our triage meeting. This would involve enabling a tooltip in the "Recently Closed Windows" application menu that shows the number of tabs closed in the window and the time that the window was closed. (The former is visible in the menu bar from "History > Recently Closed Windows", but it is not always shown in the application menu due to truncation.)

Comment 3

[Sukhmeet[:sukh]]

Attachment: Bug 1985619 - Show tab-count and timestamp tooltips for Recently Closed Windows in the app menu. r?sfoster

Comment 4

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

I've left feedback on the patch and requested a couple of changes.

Comment 5

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

Patch has r+. I've pushed to try and will land next week if all looks good.

Comment 6

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/273e137ee433
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/87b41f39a0f9
Show tab-count and timestamp tooltips for Recently Closed Windows in the app menu. r=sfoster,fluent-reviewers,sessionstore-reviewers,bolsson,sthompson

Comment 7

[agoloman]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/87b41f39a0f9

Comment 8

[Iulian Moraru]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/87b41f39a0f9

Comment 9

[Sukhmeet[:sukh]]

cool

Comment 10

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

Thanks :sukh! Yeah we got this landed finally.