583401 - When restoring tabs, the oldest ones are being loaded first (instead of newest)

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[David K.]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0b2) Gecko/20100720 Firefox/4.0b2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0b2) Gecko/20100720 Firefox/4.0b2

When doing a session restore, Firefox starts restoring the oldest tabs first.
This behavior isn't desirable, because the newest tabs are the ones you'll most likely continue working with. So, when a lot of tabs were open (say, 100-200) it can take several minutes for the most recent tabs to be loaded.

With Firefox 3.6.x, the behavior was slightly different: the most recent 15 tabs or so were loaded, *then* it continued with the oldest ones.
This was better, but I believe optimal behavior would be to load the tabs strictly in the order "newest to oldest".

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a few dozen tabs.
2. Save session.
3. Restore session.
Actual Results:  
Tabs are loaded in the order "oldest to newest".

Expected Results:  
Tabs should load in the order "newest to oldest".

Comment 1

[RC]

I'm experiencing this as well. It also happens to me when switching in and out of private mode and after updates from nightlies. Every time after a nightly update I have to switch into and back out of private browsing mode to get my tabs in the correct order.

Quite annoying. Especially coupled with once I've gone into and out of private mode, my app tabs are overlapped by standard tabs so then I have to de-app tab and re-app tab my app tabs to fix their appearance. 

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0b3pre) Gecko/20100803 Minefield/4.0b3pre

Comment 2

[Paul O'Shannessy [:zpao] (not bugmail, email directly)]

(In reply to comment #0)
> When doing a session restore, Firefox starts restoring the oldest tabs first.
> This behavior isn't desirable, because the newest tabs are the ones you'll most
> likely continue working with. So, when a lot of tabs were open (say, 100-200)
> it can take several minutes for the most recent tabs to be loaded.
> 
> With Firefox 3.6.x, the behavior was slightly different: the most recent 15
> tabs or so were loaded, *then* it continued with the oldest ones.
> This was better, but I believe optimal behavior would be to load the tabs
> strictly in the order "newest to oldest".

I don't believe this should have changed. The behavior should still be that we load your visible tabs before your tabs that aren't visible (it's not always obvious it does happen that way).

We've never loaded your 15 most recent ones by last accessed (in case that's what you thought).

The only case I think this could happen is if you had an app tab selected while your tab strip was scrolled all the way to the right when quitting & then your tab strip scroll position wasn't restored.

(In reply to comment #1)
> I'm experiencing this as well. It also happens to me when switching in and out
> of private mode and after updates from nightlies. Every time after a nightly
> update I have to switch into and back out of private browsing mode to get my
> tabs in the correct order.

This sounds like a different issue. The way I interpreted David's comment is that they were being loaded in the wrong order (i.e. the last tab showed the web page first). It sounds to me as though you're saying your tabs are appearing in the wrong order. That would be a different bug entirely (and an interesting one at that).

> Quite annoying. Especially coupled with once I've gone into and out of private
> mode, my app tabs are overlapped by standard tabs so then I have to de-app tab
> and re-app tab my app tabs to fix their appearance.

That's bug 579869 (and I see you're already CCed on that bug)

Comment 3

[David K.]

The recent changes in tab loading behavior essentially fixed this as a byproduct, so it is no longer an issue.