772141 - Recent nightly: Enter private browsing, quit. Restart, get private session, prior session lost.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Private Browsing, defect)

Description

[Timothy Miller]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:16.0) Gecko/16.0 Firefox/16.0
Build ID: 20120628065213

Steps to reproduce:

1. Start private browsing mode.
2. Go to some web sites.
3. Quit
4. Restart


Actual results:

The private session was restored, while the prior non-private session was lost.


Expected results:

The prior session should have been restored, and the private session forgotten.

It's possible that this has been fixed, but this is a very recent regression with Nightly.

Comment 1

[juan becerra [:juanb]]

I've been trying to reproduce this on Mac and Linux and I haven't been able to using the latest nightly. Whenever I quit the private browsing session and restart, I get the home page which has the option to restore the previous session, and so far it has worked every time.

Comment 2

[Timothy Miller]

This is the first and only time this has ever happened to me.  I tried reproducing it myself but couldn't.  However, the fact that it's even remotely possible isn't good.

Comment 3

[Timothy Miller]

I haven't yet reproduced the original problem I reported, but I have  just had nightly forget some tabs upon restoring the session while exiting private mode.  They were all there before entering, but some were missing after exit.

Possibly a separate problem, but when starting up the browser, if you hit cmd-shift-p before all windows open up, then they will open up in private mode and be lost from the non private session.

Some of this may argue for having private windows rather than putting the whole browser into private mode and relying on a session restore that sometimes fails, but I realize that it'll be years before gecko is multiprocess capable, if ever.

Comment 4

[Timothy Miller]

I've been able to reproduce the bug I mentioned where tabs that were open before entering private mode are not reopened when exiting private mode.  (I keep having to restore an older session I dug out of Time Machine.)

Comment 5

[Josh Matthews [:jdm]]

I don't suppose you have a sequence of steps that will regularly reproduce either problem you've mentioned so far? It would be nice to bisect this problem to figure out when it started.

Comment 6

[Timothy Miller]

Well, kinda.  I have these three pages open in this order, in one window:

axiomaxiom.livejournal.com/58693.html
ftp://ftp.cse.ohio-state.edu/pub/tech-report/TRList.html
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/disable-linux-firewall-under-centos-rhel-fedora/

1. Have the last tab selected
2. Hit Cmd-Shift-P to enter private mode
3. Go to some web sites.  Youtube, your bank account.  Whatever.  It technically shouldn't matter if you do nothing at all.
4. Hit Cmd-Shift-P to exit private mode

When the window is restored, the first tab is missing.

Interestingly, if you restart the browser, it sometimes comes back.

Comment 7

[(no longer active)]

Juan, can you please try to see if you can reproduce this using the steps in comment 6?  Thanks!

Comment 8

[juan becerra [:juanb]]

I've tried the steps in comment #6, but I haven't had any luck reproducing the problem.

I also tried combining different scenarios with the settings like starting up with tabs from last time, starting with the home page, restoring previous session, loading tabs only upon selection, using tab groups, quiting before/after starting PB mode, but I haven't been able to observe the missing tab problem.

Comment 9

[(no longer active)]

Timothy, have you tried reproducing this bug in safe mode?

Comment 10

[(no longer active)]

Timothy, did you get a chance to test this again?

Comment 11

[Timothy Miller]

I think it's been working better recently.  I also think that some of the flakiness only pertained to tabs that were restored from really old sessions (one that I had been saving and restoring for like a year), like how the session is stored has changed.  Any entirely new tabs appeared to be completely reliable.

It appears as though Firefox often changes file formats for settings and things, and importing files from older versions is really unreliable.

Comment 12

[(no longer active)]

Thanks for getting back to us.  I'm going to mark this as WORKSFORME then.  Please reopen the bug if you can reproduce it reliably.  Thanks!