807189 - Program closes upon switching to another application, breaking multitasking

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 792131

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[csolisr]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:16.0) Gecko/16.0 Firefox/16.0
Build ID: 20121024072213

Steps to reproduce:

Opened Firefox.
Switched to the home screen.
Opened another program.
Switched back to Firefox.


Actual results:

Firefox had closed, forcing to reload the whole program and all the already-open tabs.


Expected results:

Firefox should remain open in the background instead of closing. The lost time and redundant data consumption are considerable.

Comment 1

[Paul Feher]

I'm not able to reproduce this using Firefox 19.0a1 (2012-11-19) on Samsung Galaxy R(Android 4.1.2).

Can you try using Nightly (http://nightly.mozilla.org) and see if this is still reproducible?

Comment 2

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

What device are you using, and how many tabs did you have open? Android will kill background apps when it is running low on memory, so depending on what you had running and how much memory your device has this might be expected behaviour. We have efforts under way to reduce memory usage and help with this problem but since this is Android system behaviour there's no way to eliminate it completely.

Comment 3

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

What device are you using, and how many tabs did you have open? Android will kill background apps when it is running low on memory, so depending on what you had running and how much memory your device has this might be expected behaviour. We have efforts under way to reduce memory usage and help with this problem but since this is Android system behaviour there's no way to eliminate it completely.

Comment 4

[csolisr]

Tested on a Samsung Galaxy Wonder, with 512 MB RAM. It is indeed an issue with memory, because the problem is not present when the memory is freed (by closing other programs). However, multitasking is limited because of Firefox's memory usage.

Comment 5

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

There isn't any one thing we can do to fix this, but we've been working on a number of things that should improve the situation. I'm tempted to resolve this bug as a duplicate of bug 792131 which is tracking those improvements. The main problem with this bug is that there's no specific metric we can use to determine when this bug has been "fixed" since it will always happen, just at a different memory threshold.