624952 - Firefox 4.0 often shows all tab groups' tabs on startup

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox Graveyard :: Panorama, defect, P2)

Description

[nonoitall]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b9) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b9) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b9

When I use multiple tab groups (which is pretty much constantly) and I open Firefox (restoring the previous session's tabs), Firefox typically shows *all* of my tabs as though there are no separate tab groups at all.  If I click the panorama button and then go back to the group I was in, then it behaves correctly, only showing me tabs from that group.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Have multiple tab groups and close Firefox, saving tabs.
2.  Start Firefox.
Actual Results:  
Tabs from all tab groups are shown in the tab bar.

Expected Results:  
Only tabs from the last open tab group should be shown in the tab bar.

This seems to happen almost every time I start Firefox in Windows XP.  It happens rarely (if ever??) when launching Firefox on Linux, even though I'm using a shared profile for both platforms.  It seems like if I start FF in Linux, and the last time I closed it was in Windows, all tabs may show up, however subsequent startups in Linux will work correctly.  Also if I close FF in Linux and then start it in XP, it seems like it always behaves correctly the first time, though subsequent startups in XP will behave incorrectly again, so this may have something to do with how tabs are saved in Windows (XP).

Comment 1

[Kevin Hanes]

While unfortunate, this is not that surprising to me. Panorama is entirely unaware of Sync, and we've never tested it in that regard, let alone across different operating systems. :/

Comment 2

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> While unfortunate, this is not that surprising to me. Panorama is entirely
> unaware of Sync, and we've never tested it in that regard, let alone across
> different operating systems. :/

Sounds pretty bad. Sync is a built-in feature now.

Comment 3

[nonoitall]

Actually I wasn't using Sync - this is on a dual-boot machine where Linux and Windows XP both have access to the same Firefox profile directory.  Even before I started sharing the profile between OS's though (back when I used it only on XP), the problem still presented almost every time that I started Firefox.  Also, this problem does *not* seem to occur on my laptop w/Windows Vista (64-bit).  (Or at least, it happens rarely enough there that I don't recall it happening.)

So it looks to me like this is something specific not only to the Windows version, but specifically to how it behaves on XP (and possibly 2000, since it's similar to XP, though I've not tested it on 2000).

Comment 4

[nonoitall]

With a bit more testing, it seems like this happens more often (exclusively?) when the new Firefox menu is turned on.  I tried switching back to the old-fashioned menus yesterday and FF showed the correct tabs on startup every time.  Today, I switched back to using the Firefox menu and the problem has returned.

Comment 5

[Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine [:mitcho]]

I think I've seen the same thing on shutdown. My hunch is that, on startup and shutdown, we may "unhide" all tabs at one point or another, and accidentally flash the full tabbar with all tabs.

Comment 6

[Ian Gilman [:iangilman]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> I think I've seen the same thing on shutdown. My hunch is that, on startup and
> shutdown, we may "unhide" all tabs at one point or another, and accidentally
> flash the full tabbar with all tabs.

This code, in UI.init, sure looks like the culprit:

      iQ(window).bind("beforeunload", function() {
        Array.forEach(gBrowser.tabs, function(tab) {
          gBrowser.showTab(tab);
        });
      });

Strange that it only happens sometimes or for some people. At any rate, this is leftover from a long time ago and should just get cleaned out!

Comment 7

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Attachment: patch v1

Removed the lines as Ian suggested. Pushed to try.

Comment 8

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Passed try!

Comment 9

[Ian Gilman [:iangilman]]

Comment on attachment 505326 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v1

Looks good. 

Were you able to repro? When you tried it after removing the lines, did you see any weirdness?

Comment 10

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

No, unfortunately I could not reproduce this. I can't see any weird behaviour though we should probably have an eye on this.

Comment 11

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Attachment: patch for checkin

Comment 12

[(no longer active)]

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/1c89c6d9574c

Comment 13

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

I'm still seeing weirdness. Some of my tabs get shoved into the current group, but not all. And to be clear it's not that they're there at startup. Initially I see the right set of tabs, but as soon as I enter tabview the wrong ones are in the current group.

So this might not be the same bug but it's definitely a bug.

Comment 14

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

So Kevin linked me to bug 628188, which seems to be what is continuing to cause this issue for me. I guess we can keep this FIXED.

Comment 16

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

verified with nightly build of minefield.