779450 - Received tabs are lost upon restart/update

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Android Sync, defect, P5)

Description

[Paul [pwd]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0
Build ID: 20120731030541

Steps to reproduce:

If you receive a tab but don't open it and then update Fennec, the sent tab is lost, never to return. We should at the very least, check to see if the tab was opened rather than simply received.

Comment 1

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Thanks for the report.  I think what we do is see the incoming tab command, show a notification, and then forget about it.  If the user doesn't interact with the notification, it will be cleared by Android when the App package is upgraded.  We'll never show it again.

I think this is not something we should address any time soon but it's a valid feature request and shouldn't be closed.

Comment 2

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to Nick Alexander :nalexander from comment #1)
> I think what we do is see the incoming tab command,
> show a notification, and then forget about it. 

Correct. Commands are pretty transient in Sync, and we don't have a good place to put this instead.

Fortunately most users install updates once a month (or even more infrequently), and most users don't send tabs _to_ Android, so this isn't a big pain point.


We've considered having an "open in background" operation for Fennec, which would queue up links sent from other apps, making them available in a list when you subsequently enter the browser.

That would lose some of the neat system integration that the current approach gets (e.g., opening a pushed URL directly in Google Maps or Tumblr or whatever), but would solve this bug.

Comment 3

[Paul [pwd]]

To solve this bug, set a flag to say the tab has been received upon opening a matching URL otherwise send the tab again every XX minutes/hours. I'm sure that's simple enough. Though I would argue that this isn't a big issue. It only bubbled to the surface as I was doing some triage of my bugs.

Personally I'd much rather bug 779449 got some attention. We see lists of transactions on banks, lists of journeys on travel cards, lists of so many things, why we don't provide a list of sent/received tabs is beyond me and it pretty much negates any problems this bug highlights.

Comment 4

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Current Sync is a really bad solution to this problem. A better approach will eventually be implemented.

Comment 5

[Paul [pwd]]

Is there a meta bug to keep an eye on?

Comment 6

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to Paul [pwd] from comment #5)
> Is there a meta bug to keep an eye on?

Bug 1098303 will probably end up covering it.

Comment 7

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Re-triaging per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1473195

Needinfo :susheel if you think this bug should be re-triaged.

Comment 8

[Sorina Florean [:sflorean]]

This is still reproducible on latest Firefox builds, 66 with update la 67, and 68 -> update to the latest build of Nightly.
Device: Samsung Galaxy Note8 (Android 9.0).
Not reproducible when restarting the browser.

Comment 9

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.