961752 - about:sessionrestore has no feedback for corrupt sessionrestore.js

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Attachment: sessionstore - Copy.zip all null char

At least twice in the last couple months my laptop has hung solid (screen on, mouse cursor unmovable) - Dec 30 and last night.  In both cases I discovered sessionstore.js is all nulls.  (dec 30 file is 875kb, last night's is 805kb)

When firefox starts up with this corrupt session file, there is no feedback: 1. nothing in error console (2'll double check but I'm pretty sure this is the case), and 1. I see just a blank tab, no session restore information nor any tabs reoped - which is consistent with manually doing about:sessionrestore and getting nothing, which is what I get.

(eventually Firefox starts creating a valid sessionstore.js )

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

note after startup, sesionstore.js and sesionstore.bak were initially identical.


I was incorrect about nothing in the web console.  As previously stated, UI shows nothing to user.   But web console has ...


Could not read chrome manifest 'file:///C:/Program%20Files/Mozilla.org/FF%2029.0a1%202014-01-20/chrome.manifest'.
WARN addons.xpi: Ignoring missing add-on in C:\Program Files\Copernic Desktop Search - Home\Firefox35Connector XPIProvider.jsm:7323
Could not read chrome manifest 'file:///C:/Program%20Files/Mozilla.org/FF%2029.0a1%202014-01-20/browser/extensions/%7B972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd%7D/chrome.manifest'.
While creating services from category 'profile-after-change', could not create service for entry 'Disk Space Watcher Service', contract ID '@mozilla.org/toolkit/disk-space-watcher;1'
SessionStartup: The session file contained un-parse-able JSON: SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data
A promise chain failed to handle a rejection.

Date: Mon Jan 20 2014 10:52:54 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
Full Message: TypeError: this._initialState is null
Full Stack: SessionStartup.prototype._onSessionFileRead@resource://app/components/nsSessionStartup.js:135
Handler.prototype.process@resource://gre/modules/Promise.jsm:767
this.PromiseWalker.walkerLoop@resource://gre/modules/Promise.jsm:531
 nsSessionStartup.js:135

Comment 2

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

I'm not sure what kind of feedback we could show for a corrupted session file. The problem is that with the JSON format there is no chance of automatically recovering any of the lost data. That's why we don't show anything. A page that says "Oops, we lost your session" would at least explain what's going on but seem like we didn't make any effort to rescue session data while in practice we just can't.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

right, there's nothing to recover. And perhaps something more can be done (I'm not in a position to say) but my point is there is no feedback, when there should be.  Thus the user is left to wonder - did I do something wrong, what failed, etc

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

bug 932110 is another example of both file of nulls, and no sessionrestore tab

Comment 5

[Florian Bender]

Since Bug 883609 landed, is this still useful, or just not worth the effort?

Comment 6

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Let's mark this as WONTFIX. With bug 883609 in Firefox 33+ we should recover a lot better from corrupted sessionstore files and should not need special feedback.

Comment 7

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

I believe that we should provide at least some minimal feedback (e.g. `Cu.reportError`), to aid with troubleshooting. In the future, we'll also want to plug this into self-support.