Firefox does not restore session after update

[chrs]

Binary package hint: firefox

When an update to a new version of Firefox (3.0) is available and you install that update (with the update manager) then the next time you start Firefox all your open tabs are gone and Firefox presents you with two tabs, one telling you that Firefox was updated and one with your home page.

Steps (when I have a Firefox window open):
- I click on the icon that tells me new updates are available;
- I install the updates with the Update Manager;
- when Firefox was open and there was an update for Firefox, the bulb icon gives me a message that Firefox has to be restarted;
- I close Firefox and click on 'Save and quit' (so my tabs are saved);
- I open Firefox again and get the two tabs described above (and not the tabs of my last session).

[covox (covox)]

Confirmed under Jaunty. The steps above are reproducible; all you need to do is have Firefox open with several tabs, update it with Update Manager, then quit as per the notification instructions. Clicking "Exit" from the File menu won't bring up the "Do you want Firefox to save your tabs" dialogue, and on the next start you won't have any tabs.

Strangely, if you "killall firefox" right after an update it will recover all your tabs without a hitch. Although it does sometimes bring up the redundant "Your browser has been updated and needs to be restarted" toolbar, which would have been nice to have in the first place since it also saves the tabs.

[No (11111nonononono-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

I can confirm this, too. It would be nice if the notification would have a restart button.

[Armando Di Cianno (armando-goodship)]

This isn't necessarily Ubuntu specific -- after having it happen more than once on update from Update Manager, I had it happen when I installed an extension manually, and was told to restart.

The gravity of this simple issue is astounding -- I just lot about 40+ tabs.

[michael perigard (overprescribed)]

fafhrd:
If you're having trouble with firefox not restoring your session after installing an extension manually, you should file a bug with the mozilla bug tracker, or with the extension itself.
This bug is about the ubuntu update manager updating firefox and not restoring the user's session.

[No (11111nonononono-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

I just updated Firefox in karmic and it restored the session after the update.
Did anyone else tried this in karmic?

[Thomas E Jenkins (thomas-jenkins)]

I encountered this in Karmic upgrading to 3.5.4+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.10.1. In this case it did not prompt me to restart as I believe it did in the past and hitting Ctrl-n before restarting produced error windows that were visible in the taskbar but not as a window on the screen, clicking them had no effect.

[Dale Amon (amon)]

I hit the same bug in today's update. Usually if there is a problem I can simply take the sessionstore.bak file and overwrite sessionstore.js to recover but that is not working.

I really need to get this all back because I have two Firefox windows, each with about 10-15 open tabs related to my work that is pending or current.

I notice that every time ff closes it blows away the sessionstore.js file rather than writing writing out to it, or at least that was the action without adding any new tabs to the default window. Every time I start it I get

-rw------- 1 amon amon 167995 2010-02-18 13:37 sessionstore.bak2
-rw------- 1 amon amon 486 2010-02-18 14:00 sessionstore.js

even when I have recreated sessionstore.bak and sessionstore.js from the 'real' backup, bak2.

[Dale Amon (amon)]

I have a recovery process for you, but it requires that you have immediately saved your old sessionstore.bak, or have a way to get one from your company backup system.

cd .mozilla/firefox/<your current profile>/

<your current profile> will probably have a name like 'wzy9plsu.default'. If there are more than one check the dates.

you should find that you have a file named sessionstore.bak. Immediately save a copy of it

cp -a sessionstore.bak sessionstore.bak2

Now start up firefox. Create a new tab. Exit firefox and tell it to save tabs. Then overwrite the
file firefox just created:

cp -a sessionstore.bak2 sessionstore.js

restart firefox and if you had the correct backup file, your sesions should be back.

My guess is there is a flag somewhere else that says to firefox that it has a 'virgin' install, and until you cause that to get cleared, it will not pay attention to old contents of sessionstore.js or use the usual sessionstore.bak.

Hope this saves a few people some grief.

[James Roper (jroper2-gmail)]

Not sure if I should raise a new feature request for my issue or not, but its related to this, I'm not sure how closely though.

I don't have Firefox configured to prompt to save my tabs when I quit, so I don't expect my tabs to be restored after I select exit manually.

However, if I install a Firefox addon, or if I upgrade Firefox on Mac OSX or Windows, it asks me to restart, and when I click restart, and it resumes the session with my open tabs. I really like this feature because the only time I want to restore my tabs is when I'm restarting to pick up an update.

Obviously, if Firefox updates are being managed by something other than itself, there's no way for Firefox to know when you select exit whether you want your tabs to be restored or not, so it would be nice if Ubuntu provided this option to tell Firefox to restart to pick up updates.