855869 - Firefox thinks something bad happened when windows closed with AppleScript

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 845681

(Firefox :: Shell Integration, defect)

Description

[Jerry Krinock]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_3) AppleWebKit/536.28.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.3 Safari/536.28.10

Steps to reproduce:

• Activate Firefox in Mac OS X 10.8.3
• Tell Firefox to quit with a simple AppleScript…

tell application "Firefox"
	close windows
	quit
end tell

• Relaunch Firefox


Actual results:

About half the time, Firefox will show a page saying "Well, this is embarassing.  Firefox is having trouble…" page.

This is shown in the attached screencast.  Enjoy!


Expected results:

Firefox should have launched normally because there was in fact no trouble.

Comment 1

[Jerry Krinock]

OK, since Bugzilla said that my screencast was too big to upload, I uploaded it to my own site.  You can watch it here…

http://sheepsystems.com/engineering/Firefox-Embarrassing.mov

Comment 2

[Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA]]

I'm guessing the script just kills the process instead of closing the browser normally, so the session restore page is displayed - which is normal for crash/process kill.

Comment 3

[Jerry Krinock]

Thank you, Virgil.  There are no AppleScript commands to kill a process.  AppleScript is gentle.  As their names imply, the two commands I'm sending in that screencast tell Firefox to 'close windows' and 'quit'.  The former should be handled as though the user activated each window in turn and clicked the red 'close' button.  The latter should be handled as though the user clicked in the main menu: Firefox > Quit.

Possibly there is some kind of race condition which sometimes causes Firefox to abort the 'close windows' command in a bad way if this command is not finished executing when the 'quit' command arrives.

Comment 4

[Tiziana Sellitto [:tiziana]]

Which Firefox version are you using, which builiID?

Comment 5

[Jerry Krinock]

I don't know which version I had at the time, unless it shows in the video, because Firefox updates itself frequently.  Probably you can tell from the date of my report (March 28), and the fact that I am on the "beta" update channel.  I *currently* have Firefox version 21.0.  Let me know if you need me to run the test again with the current version of Firefox.

Comment 6

[Tiziana Sellitto [:tiziana]]

If you can tray it again now and let me know.
Thanks!

Comment 7

[Jerry Krinock]

It seems to be fixed in Firefox 21.0, Tiziana.  I hope that's because you fixed it and not because of some change in the test conditions I don't realize.

I even had open the same web page I had open in that screencast I attached to this report, and when that worked, I even dug into my Time Machine and restored my Firefox profile folder from April 1, 4 days after I made that screencast.  I ran the script 10 times with the troublesome "close windows", and each time after relaunching Firefox I got the expected home page, and never got a single "Embarrassing" page.

Did you fix it?

Comment 8

[Tiziana Sellitto [:tiziana]]

I've not fixed it by myself but I've reproduced this bug with Nighly 22.0a1 (2013-03-28) the date you reported the bug
You can find all the Nightly builds on http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/

last good Nightly is 21.0a1 (2013-02-19)
first bad Nightly is 22.0a1 (2013-02-20) 

It seems to be fixed since Nighlty 23.0a1 (2013-04-12) in all the other release channel, too. 
I no longer reproduce that it WORKSFORME.

Comment 9

[Jerry Krinock]

Tiziana, if I put my history and your history together, we have

20.x    Bad
21.0    Good
21.0a1  Good
22.0a1  Bad
23.0a1  Good

And neither of us know what caused it to go good or bad.

Hmmmmm.