812326 - Unloaded pages no longer working properly (private browsing, cache)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Terrell Kelley]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0
Build ID: 20121024073032

Steps to reproduce:

I put Firefox in Private Browsing mode. Closed Private Browsing mode.


Actual results:

My previous pages did not come back as they were. The pages reloaded from the website. 


Expected results:

The page should have been reloaded from disk. This is how it worked before. I know, because I remember having to refresh the page to get the most current version.

Comment 1

[Terrell Kelley]

For some reason, the "easy" bug report is missing a field to put in the URLs. The pages that had to reload were https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=807236 and https://sites.google.com/site/imgscalereductionff/home/.

What becomes the "Steps to Reproduce" is also erroneously called "What happened," hence why I did not give a step by step. If that's what you want, you might want to look into rephrasing the questions.

I forgot to mention: this also happens in session recovery after restarting Firefox, when, again, it previously did not. I merely reproduced using Private Browser mode--originally the problem happened because a poorly behaved uninstaller forcibly shutdown Firefox without prompting. Somehow it was able to still close Firefox while the "Are you sure you want to close multiple tabs" dialog was open. But that's another issue/bug.

Comment 2

[Terrell Kelley]

It now dawns on me that this may be because the pages are HTTPS, and thus are not being cached in the local cache normally. This is acceptable for normal use (although I'd say it's a bug on both sites since you're both using HTTPS when there is no secure information being sent, thus breaking browser caching), but not for when someone switches to Private Browser Mode, since there is no warning that you will lose your work. If you can't save them to disk, than HTTPS pages need to stay in memory and not be unloaded. The exception would be if the page has a timeout and it occurs while the private browser session is running. But that might be able to be checked right before you come out of Private Browsing mode.

Another thing I noticed is that it doesn't apply to the current tab when you start Private Browser Mode, so that means you already have a way of handling this. I had this tab open, used Private Browsing mode, came back, and all my text was still present. Please use the same method for other tabs.

Or you could unload the tab the same way you handle it when I close a tab. If I unclose the tab, it comes back in the same state I left it, not even reloading images.

Comment 3

[Terrell Kelley]

New info: this is an intermittant bug. I went to go test this in Nightly, to see if it had already been fixed, and it seemed like it was. So then I tested again in Firefox, and, for some reason, it worked, just like in Nightly. I don't know what's going on.

And sorry for all the bugspam. This is weird.

Comment 4

[Terrell Kelley]

It even worked when I closed and restarted Firefox!

Comment 5

[Loic]

Did you try to reproduce it with a fresh profile?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles

Comment 6

[Terrell Kelley]

I can't reproduce it, period. My suspicion is that it was related to a browser toolbar that got unintentionally installed, since it happened right after I uninstalled it.

So, oddly enough, I'm resolving this as WORKSFORME, as I can't even reproduce it.