801032 - Provide option to always restore tabs on startup.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 801412

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Paul [pwd]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:19.0) Gecko/19.0 Firefox/19.0
Build ID: 20121012030610

Steps to reproduce:

If a user has started a browsing session on Fennec but then starts using Firefox on desktop, should said user have left Fennec long enough, Fennec won't restore the tabs. The user will have lost the tabs in Fennec and given the unified history, there's no way to easily track down the tabs.

I propose that (even as a hidden pref) a method is provided to always restore tabs as we do with desktop.

Comment 1

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

(In reply to Paul [sabret00the] from comment #0)
> If a user has started a browsing session on Fennec but then starts using
> Firefox on desktop, should said user have left Fennec long enough, Fennec
> won't restore the tabs.

Are you saying that you have a session open in Fennec, you never choose to quit Fennec or force close Fennec, but your session gets lost? If so, that's a bug and shouldn't be happening.

Can you give more detailed steps to reproduce the issue you're describing?

Comment 2

[Paul [pwd]]

(In reply to Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson) from comment #1)
> (In reply to Paul [sabret00the] from comment #0)
> > If a user has started a browsing session on Fennec but then starts using
> > Firefox on desktop, should said user have left Fennec long enough, Fennec
> > won't restore the tabs.
> 
> Are you saying that you have a session open in Fennec, you never choose to
> quit Fennec or force close Fennec, but your session gets lost? If so, that's
> a bug and shouldn't be happening.
> 
> Can you give more detailed steps to reproduce the issue you're describing?

It happens constantly.

Have 8 tabs open, leave Fennec for a while, return to Fennec (in most occasions via an external link) and have to open about:home in order to reopen the tabs and make sure I don't lose any data.

I should add that the tabs persist in RTM, just not in Nightly.

Comment 3

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

What you're describing sounds like an OOM kill where Android kills Fennec to open up resources for other apps. But in these cases, when Fennec is reopened, we *always* use the session file to restore the session.

So either the OOM restore is broken or Fennec is getting killed another way. Do you have any task killer apps installed?

Comment 4

[Paul [pwd]]

I do have a task killer app, though it requires root so shouldn't be killing anything. The HTC One X is notoriously bad with it's multi-tasking though. That said, I average near 200MB of memory free at all times.

Comment 5

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

I recommend removing any task killer apps to see if you still have this problem. Which task killer are you using that requires root?

Comment 6

[Paul [pwd]]

OK, turns out it didn't require root. Oops! It was "System Panel / Task Manager" So uninstalled and yet I've still lost tabs a couple times since my last post.

Comment 7

[AJ Jordan [:strugee] (he/they)]

This happens for me too. I'm running the latest Nightly build (1/7/13).
Generally I'll put my phone to sleep for an extended period of time; Nightly apparently terminates (or gets terminated) and tabs are gone, so I have to restore them from about:home.
I'm running an Android flavor that's fairly close to stock on the Verizon Galaxy Nexus (slight carrier modifications, but not extremely serious - Android 4.1.1).
I don't use task killers, and have about 6.1 GB of (hard drive) space available. I currently have about 220 MB of memory free, with about 470 MB used, although I do occasionally (about once every couple of days) get OOM alerts (from an app that tells me when that happens, not from the system).

Comment 8

[liam]

I have this problem as well with nexus 4 Aurora.
There should be an option to always restore the session instead of us having to do it manually with about:home, assuming about:home is even populated as it sometimes loses what was open if there are a quick series of crashes.

Thanks/liam

Comment 9

[Ryan]

Also have this issue on Samsung Galaxy S3 on both the release and beta versions. Closing the app (swipe away from recent apps list) always results in all tabs being closed and have to be reopened from start page next time.

Comment 10

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

I believe these are equivalent.