Firefox 35 does not restore previous session / tabs

[dllud]

On trusty I updated firefox to 35.0+build3-0ubuntu0.14.04.2

After the update firefox no longer restored my previous session, it starts with a single blank tab. Also on the "New tab" window all tiles are empty. I gave a look to the sessionstore.js file and firefox isn't touching when closing.

I tested with two different profiles and the same happened for both.

Reverting to 34.0+build2-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 got session store working again.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Michael Stucki (mstucki)]

Same problem here. Already wondered if nobody else has the problem.
Can someone raise the importance of it? I just lost my open tabs during upgrade. (Good that I have a backup at hand...)

[dllud (dllud)]

Bug confirmed on another machine, this time an i386 one that has the same Firefox profiles. A friend of mine had no problems when upgrading to version 35 on his machine. Perhaps the bug is due to some misconfiguration on our Firefox profiles.

[Michael Stucki (mstucki)]

Thought so too. Disabled all plugins and tried again, but it still does not work...

Just now I tried with an empty profile (rm -rf ~/.mozilla/). To my surprise, tabs are properly restored now!
So it seems to be a problem within my profile. Would still be good to find out, as I don't want to delete my profile for having tabs restored again in the future...

[Johannes Gowin (johannesgowin)]

First I thought it was a problem with the Firefox build from the Mozilla Security PPA but now I have the same problem with the build from the official repo as well.
Next guess was profile-sync-daemon but after removing it Firefox still doesn't restore tabs.
Disabling all add-ons and extensions also didn't solve the issue for me.

[Alec Kojaev (the-old-nomad)]

Same problem here.

This seems to be some incompatible change in session restoration API, because when I have add-ons enabled in FF 35.0, interface of SessionManager add-on (which works perfectly in FF 34.0) is botched. SessionManager is version 0.8.1.6 (2014-09-29), which, according to its revision history, included "Firefox 35 compatibility changes".

[Michael Stucki (mstucki)]

Found the problem! Seems like a change of behaviour makes one of our settings behave differently than before:

1. Open about:config
2. Change dom.indexedDB.enabled to true (which is default, but in my case it was set to false)
3. Restart the browser

This finally works. My open tabs from before are even restored!

For more details, see http://www.ghacks.net/2015/01/16/fix-add-ons-not-working-in-firefox-35/

[dllud (dllud)]

Thanks Michael! That worked for me too.

[Wuergler (rw-launchpad)]

Changing dom.indexedDB.enabled to true worked for me, too. Thanks also for the link.

So, unfortunately, Mozilla believes this is a feature ...

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

dllud and anyone else affected,

We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to review all reported bugs in a timely manner. This bug was reported some time ago and there have been many changes in Ubuntu and Firefox since that time.

We'd like to close this bug report due to its age and long period of inactivity so please let us know if you still see a problem which is related to the one that was reported.

If we do not hear from you this bug report will expire in approximately 60 days time.

Thank you all for helping make Ubuntu better.

Paul White
[Ubuntu Bug Squad]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for firefox (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]