642722 - Stuck on launch, shows old Restore Session Window each time.

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Implied]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.20.25 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.4 Safari/533.20.27
Build Identifier: Firefox 4 Release Candidate 1

Each time I launch Firefox 4 I'm greeted with the same Restore Session Tab. It's been happening for slightly over a month or so now, around the time when Firefox 4 Beta 8-10 came out.

Now that I've moved to Release Candidate 1, it also shows that page "Thanks For Downloading Firefox 4" each time I launch, the one that should only show up the first time you launch Firefox.

Also, any settings saved are forgotten once I re-start Firefox. History remains, but the Restore Session Feature and my Preferences are re-set to what they were before.

I've tried changing "When Firefox Starts:" to "Show a Blank Page" from "Show my Windows and Tabs from last time" but it doesn't seem to work.

I'm not sure how exactly to reproduce, since all I can really remember doing was upgrading from a previous Firefox 4 Beta Build to the next one, and then the Restore Session Window just got frozen there ever since.

Only have 3 Addons enabled, DivX Web Player 2.1, Shockwave Flash 10.1, Silverlight Plug-In 4.0.5 all of which I've had for a while now.

The workaround I'm using right now is to simply Bookmark any Tabs I've had open before closing Firefox. Unfortunately doesn't help if my Computer gets a Kernel Panic or just freezes, or (in the rare case) if Firefox crashes.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Upgrade from a previous Firefox 4 Beta Build to a newer one.
2. Launch Firefox 4.
3.
Actual Results:  
Shows two Tabs: Restore Session with the old session, and Thanks for Downloading Firefox, or Welcome to Firefox, can't remember exactly now.

Expected Results:  
Should have launched a Tab with Restore Session but previous session, not an older session which it seems to be stuck on.

Using Default Theme, haven't used any other since Firefox 3, before Firefox 4 Beta began. Using an iMac from late 2006, no  special components, Built to Order but factory components.

Build Configuration, incase it helps:

about:buildconfig
Source

Built from http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-2.0/rev/5f8f494a4c29
Build platform
target
i386-apple-darwin10.2.0
Build tools
Compiler 	Version 	Compiler flags
gcc-4.2 -arch i386 	gcc version 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646) (dot 1) 	-Wall -W -Wno-unused -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align -W -gdwarf-2 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk -fno-strict-aliasing -fpascal-strings -fno-common -pthread -DNO_X11 -DNDEBUG -DTRIMMED -gdwarf-2 -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer
g++-4.2 -arch i386 	gcc version 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646) (dot 1) 	-fno-rtti -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Woverloaded-virtual -Wsynth -Wno-ctor-dtor-privacy -Wno-non-virtual-dtor -Wcast-align -Wno-invalid-offsetof -Wno-variadic-macros -Werror=return-type -gdwarf-2 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk -fno-strict-aliasing -fpascal-strings -fno-common -fshort-wchar -pthread -DNO_X11 -DNDEBUG -DTRIMMED -gdwarf-2 -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer
Configure arguments

--target=i386-apple-darwin10.2.0 --with-macos-sdk=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk --enable-application=browser --enable-update-channel=release --enable-update-packaging --enable-tests --enable-official-branding --enable-debug-symbols=-gdwarf-2
Source

Built from http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-2.0/rev/5f8f494a4c29
Build platform
target
x86_64-apple-darwin10.2.0
Build tools
Compiler 	Version 	Compiler flags
gcc-4.2 -arch x86_64 	gcc version 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646) (dot 1) 	-Wall -W -Wno-unused -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align -W -gdwarf-2 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk -fno-strict-aliasing -fpascal-strings -fno-common -pthread -DNO_X11 -DNDEBUG -DTRIMMED -gdwarf-2 -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer
g++-4.2 -arch x86_64 	gcc version 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646) (dot 1) 	-fno-rtti -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Woverloaded-virtual -Wsynth -Wno-ctor-dtor-privacy -Wno-non-virtual-dtor -Wcast-align -Wno-invalid-offsetof -Wno-variadic-macros -Werror=return-type -gdwarf-2 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk -fno-strict-aliasing -fpascal-strings -fno-common -fshort-wchar -pthread -DNO_X11 -DNDEBUG -DTRIMMED -gdwarf-2 -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer
Configure arguments

--target=x86_64-apple-darwin10.2.0 --with-macos-sdk=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk --enable-application=browser --enable-update-channel=release --enable-update-packaging --enable-tests --enable-official-branding --enable-debug-symbols=-gdwarf-2

Comment 1

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

My suggestion is going to be to try to create a new profile and copy over the important things (like history & passwords - you could even just use Sync to do this). It sounds like there are somehow permission errors or we can't write certain files to disk. That would be an issue for saving preferences as well.

That might be overkill though. You can start by trying to delete sessionstore.js from your profile (after quitting) and seeing how things go when starting Firefox again.

Comment 2

[Implied]

Think you're probably right on the permission error, had some issues with permissions a while ago and then just used OS X Install to reset them, think it did a bit more than just reset to default the OS X ones though.

I don't care much about the Passwords etc, or History. Could I just make a Backup of my Bookmarks, delete Firefox entirely using AppZapper and then just Restore them to the re-installed version? Even preferences, haven't done much with them. Firefox works great for me without having to mess with much of the default settings.

Comment 3

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

Bookmarks and history are stored together unless you do an export & then import (which I think is what you were saying).

If you really don't care about the other info stored in your profile, then you can just delete ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox (you might need to depending on how messed up permissions got). Firefox will create a new profile the next time it is run.

I'm closing this bug since it's not really a Firefox problem but most likely due to something else.