365581 - Session restore breaks if there's no browser window

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Steps to reproduce:
0. Install ChatZilla in your firefox profile, restart, etc. etc.
1. Open Firefox
2. Kill Firefox with Ctrl+C in the controlling terminal, or otherwise send it a signal to make it die and get session restore up the next time you start it.
3. Run: firefox -chat
4. Randomly pick one of "Start new session" or "Restore session"
5. Notice you don't get a browser window either way.
6. Close Chatzilla normally, restart Firefox

Expected result:
No session restore dialog

Actual result:
Session restore dialog pops up again. Note that this will occur every time you start Firefox without a browser window, until you do start it with one. Note that this has nothing to do with chatzilla, and that if you have some other console flag that will fail to load a browser window, that will break it too.

Note also that opening a browser window from chatzilla (run /goto-url about:blank, or click a link) will resolve this issue, too.

I can see a couple of ways to fix this:
* Don't poke the user about session restore if there is not going to be a browser window.
* Force-open a new browser window with either the user's home page (Start new session) or the pages it used to have (Restore session)
* Force-open a browser window on Restore session, but invalidate the session if "start new session" is picked and don't open a browser window in that case.
* Tell the user about this problem in the dialog if it's too hard to fix, so they won't be really confused about wtf is going on. (Which happened to me the past few hours)

Comment 1

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

I created a new profile, and followed the reproduction steps, and never saw a session-restore dialog.

Using Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2pre) Gecko/2007012207 Firefox/2.0.0.0.

Using chatzilla off AMO.

Are you able to reproduce this with a clean profile? Also, you left version as "unspecified", is this on trunk or branch?

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Are you able to reproduce this with a clean profile? Also, you left version as
> "unspecified", is this on trunk or branch?

I can't repro on branch, but I can on (a somewhat old version of) trunk, when using a clean profile. Sorry for not mentioning it the first time around.

This is all on windows, too. If you can repro on mac trunk, this should probably be platform/os all/all. Given it worked on the 2.0 branch, it seems like it's a regression. Marking as such.

Trunk version is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a2pre) Gecko/20070110 Minefield/3.0a2pre

Comment 3

[Simon Bünzli]

Resolving as WORKSFORME due to the Session Restore prompt having been removed in bug 448976.