439675 - Firefox restart loses URLs

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Dotan Cohen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008060309 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008060309 Firefox/3.0

When closing and restarting Firefox, one has the option of restoring the previous sessions (all pages open in tabs will be reloaded upon restart). There is a bug in the implementation in which the URL of the page does not appear in the location bar until _after_ the page has loaded. This has three consequences:
1) The user cannot bookmark or copy the URL to another location.
2) If the page fails to load, then there is no way to determine which URL was in the particular tab. The best one could do is grep the History. However, users like me who erase their History upon closing Firefox are SOOL.
3) If Firefox is closed and reopened before the page loads, then the page is lost. Firefox does not remember which pages were loading in tabs that did not load before it was closed.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a slow-loading page in Firefox.
2. Close Firefox.
3. Reopen Firefox. Note that the URL is inaccessable to be copied or bookmarked.
4. Close Firefox before the page loads.
5. Reopen Firefox.
6. The tab is blank!
7. ???
8. Profit!!!
Actual Results:  
Page URL is lost.

Expected Results:  
Access to page URL.

Comment 1

[Paul Craciunoiu [:paulc]]

I've experienced this on more than just one version.

Reproduced successfully in WinXP (in VMware) on latest release:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

Quick steps I used:
1. open slow loading site multiple times (hold Ctrl or Cmd + press link), e.g. 10 times
2. Close Firefox right after, tabs were still loading.
3. Open Firefox.

At least a few of the last tabs had lost URLs for me.

Normally, losing URLs like this won't be a huge problem, but when Firefox (or by OS cause or other causes) crashes soon after it starts up, you can lose some if not all the tabs.

Maybe set the location bar URL value before anything else after creating the tab?

Comment 5

[Simon Bünzli]

(In reply to comment #0)
> 4. Close Firefox before the page loads.
> 5. Reopen Firefox.
> 6. The tab is blank!

This part of the issue should have been fixed by bug 367052. Tabs that weren't completely restored when Firefox was quit should now restore as expected.

Comment 6

[Simon Bünzli]

Attachment: wall-paper patch

This patch ensures that the URL of the page about to be restored is visible in the address bar from the start, so that even if loading is somehow interrupted, the URL can still be copied out.

The underlying issue seems to be that docshell ignores entered addresses we haven't been able to connect to yet. This is AFAICT the same issue as bug 451356.

Comment 7

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

Comment on attachment 334666 [details] [diff] [review]
wall-paper patch

r=me

Comment 8

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/746f3aa7b792

Comment 9

[Dotan Cohen]

Thanks, this will be helpful!

Comment 12

[Charles Evans]

Please also fix back to 3.5, 3.0
still losing data here...

Comment 13

[Paul O'Shannessy [:zpao] (not bugmail, email directly)]

(In reply to comment #12)
> Please also fix back to 3.5, 3.0
> still losing data here...

The fix for this was in Firefox 3.5. If you're seeing problems, please file a
new bug with symptoms & steps to reproduce.

Comment 14

[Adam Porter]

Charles was right.  This bug is not fixed, even these years later.  Also, bug 421521 is not a dupe of this bug, because this bug's patch does not fix the problem.  This bug has been re-reported several times, e.g. bug 637020.