995741 - If Fennec crashes and loses tabs, there's no way to restore said tabs

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Paul [pwd]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140410061737

Steps to reproduce:

Probably a lousy bug report, but I thought it was important to get it on the radar as it's a data loss issue and has happened to me now three times in the past couple months.

There seems to be an all or nothing attitude with tab restoration. I get that sometimes, in the best interest of running smoothly, tabs may be purged. But in that case, said tabs should be in the "tabs from last time" screen. But they're not, thus leaving no way to restore tabs. Given the limitations of the platform (no way to do a history search and see all tabs opened via a single device) it's fairly important that Fennec is able to actually do as it advertises and doesn't just lose tabs completely. Even if it means restoring a previous backup list of tabs, that list shouldn't be empty.

Comment 1

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

While I've had this problem in the past, I haven't had this problem recently.

How often does this occur for you? On every crash? On the occassional crash?

This has occasionally happened to me on desktop too, so I wonder if there shouldn't be something built into the platform to backup tabs to disk or similar (or at least as something that an add-on can do).

Comment 2

[Paul [pwd]]

(In reply to Michael Comella (:mcomella) from comment #1)
> While I've had this problem in the past, I haven't had this problem recently.
> 
> How often does this occur for you? On every crash? On the occassional crash?
> 
> This has occasionally happened to me on desktop too, so I wonder if there
> shouldn't be something built into the platform to backup tabs to disk or
> similar (or at least as something that an add-on can do).

Fennec has been really stable for me, so I'm actually unsure. But I'm pretty sure it's not every crash. I do however think there's a bug whereby (at least on my device), recent tabs isn't being populated?

Comment 3

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

Brian, have you seen this? If so, do we have a bug filed for this?

Comment 4

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

Attachment: Restore tabs after crash

I thought we checked for a crash already when deciding whether to restore, but apparently not. PREFS_WAS_STOPPED gets set in the crash reporter, so we can use that as the crash cookie.

Comment 5

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/rev/5a1b6dfdff18

Comment 6

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/5a1b6dfdff18