660212 - list of closed tabs not sufficient

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[o.reissig]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

I just got all of my open tabs closed except for 4 of them (it was like 90 before), and the list of recently closed tabs only allows me to restore 10 of them.
There is obviously no way to undo a mass-close of tabs.

oh, and because sync works 100% automatic, this desaster got pushed into the cloud destroying my only left "backup" of open tabs.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. close a lot of tabs (possibly in one mass-action)

Actual Results:  
you cannot undo this action

Expected Results:  
I should be able to undo any action, especially desasterous actions like closing tabs

Comment 1

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

There's Bug 582993 for the *closed all but one Tab* Case (-> "undo close all Tabs").

I'm unsure if this is fixable since then actually *all* closed Tabs have to be saved because there's no Possibility of Distinction of one-by-one Mass-Closures and non-mass-Closures within a given Browser Session, no?

Comment 2

[AndreiD[QA]]

Works for me on:
 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:7.0a1) Gecko/20110531 Firefox/7.0a1

*Note: I tried to reproduce the issue with 30 tabs to restore.
Could you attach a screen video capture of the issue, maybe? Thanks.

Comment 3

[o.reissig]

I now have the extension "Session manager" installed, which lets me alter the size of the list of recently closed tabs, which by default was only 10. As a quick fix, I entered 1000, but this has probably other side effects (performance?).

(In reply to comment #1)
> I'm unsure if this is fixable since then actually *all* closed Tabs have to
> be saved because there's no Possibility of Distinction of one-by-one
> Mass-Closures and non-mass-Closures within a given Browser Session, no?

I also thought about that. One way you could tell apart these two cases would leverage the temporal closeness of "close tabs" operations during mass-closes. So one could e.g. say when a Tab gets closed at most 0.1sec after the last one has been closed, they are considered one transaction and only appear as one entry in the recently closed tabs list.

Comment 4

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

(In reply to comment #3)
> I now have the extension "Session manager" installed, which lets me alter
> the size of the list of recently closed tabs, which by default was only 10.
> As a quick fix, I entered 1000, but this has probably other side effects
> (performance?).

The value is per window. So if you keep the same session around with the same window, 1000 tabs is probably going to be more than you need. And yes, there will be performance side effects there (slower startup, larger session file being written to disk).

Comment 5

[[e-mail]]

This kind of thing should not be based on a fixed list size. It should be based on a fixed time length, but not absolute. It must be relative time spent inside Firefox. You can probably just delete the "closed tab" information whenever the amount of time inside firefox becomes logically long enough that the person isn't surprised by it being missing and has made his or her decisions of what to do about it.

Also, I think sessions should be stored in a time-stamped backup sequentially, so that people's sessions don't get completely lost. You will be able to pick up where you left off from the day before (or whenever).

The current sessionstore.js and sessionstore.bak are poor implementations of session stores. I lost my entire session just now after closing firefox and reopening it. Nothing changed. it's a random bug, and I can't reproduce it, but I know for sure that having a timeline of backups would be a much better solution to this whole mess.

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

"I lost my entire session just now after closing firefox and reopening it. Nothing changed."

I mean I did nothing to cause my session to just disappear. It is really annoying because I had my usual amount of 30 to 50 tabs open.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

 o.reissig, what is your thinking on this subject, given the state of sessionrestore in newest version of Firefox?

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

 o.reissig seems to be gone

Comment 9

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

(In reply to XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall] from comment #1)
> There's Bug 582993 for the *closed all but one Tab* Case (-> "undo close all
> Tabs").

FWIW, something has been tried in Bug 887515 but has been backout for addon-compat.