Restored tab(s) not rendering after closing and re-launching Firefox
I use Firefox for Android on my Sony Xperia XA2, and I have run into a consistently-reproducible bug.
If I do this: 1. Launch Firefox and navigate to a web page (optionally *multiple* web pages on separate tabs) 2. Click the "Recents" button (square) to access the Recents Screen 3. Swipe to dismiss Firefox, which I believe terminates the application immediately 4. Launch Firefox again
After Step 4, I would expect that my tabs are restored — and, in fact they come pretty close:
- If I press Firefox's "tabs" button, I see all of the tabs which I had open
- When looking at the "tabs" view, all of the thumbnails are generated and visible for each tab
- Selecting a tab (either by pressing on it in the "tabs" view or using the "Switch to Tab" feature of the address bar) works without error, and the URL is the same as what it had been
- Refreshing the page (by clicking the three-dots menu and then the "refresh" icon) causes the blue progress bar (for loading the page) to appear, and it takes about as long as expected to finish
- If the page which was refreshed has media (e.g., a video or music), then the media plays successfully
BUT: the actual contents of the tab are entirely white! It is almost as if *everything* that Firefox is doing with regards to this tab is working property *except* for actually drawing it on the screen. This behavior persists until I close the tab from the "tabs" view. Neither reloading the page nor closing and reopening Firefox again will fix the tab — only closing it will. The "Settings" -> "Advanced" -> "Restore tabs" option is set to "Always restore" by default, but changing it to "Don't restore after quitting Firefox" surprisingly does not prevent the problem from happening.
To reinforce the notion that this is a tab-specific problem: opening *new* tabs works perfectly fine. It is possible to have a broken tab (in the way that I have described), then to open a new tab alongside it, and the new tab will *not* have the rendering problem while the old tab still does.
I'm not sure if this is related, but any time that I switch away from the Firefox activity (either by dismissing it entirely or by switching to another app), I get a notification from "Android System" which says "Firefox is running in the background." If I press this, and then press the "Force Stop" button (sometimes more than once), I can return to Firefox and see that no tabs are open. This is a way to instantly fix the problem for all tabs which may have been broken.
Has anyone else experienced this problem? I strongly prefer Firefox and am willing to keep using "Force Stop" or close individual tabs to work around the problem, but a fix or explanation would certainly be welcome.
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I thought that in the past there was a setting, at least for desktop, which let you choose if tab contents were re-rendered immediately or only upon selecting the tab, but clearly it should load upon selection. In fact, tabs are meant to handle low memory exactly that way in a current session, by discarding contents and reloading from network when opened, as far as i can tell.
Has your issue always occurred, or did it start after a firefox or android update, or did it appear with no notable changes prior?
Thank you for your response, crankygoat. I believe that you are right, and may be referring to the browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand option. This has apparently been set to "true" by default since version 13.0.1, and gives the behavior which you described — whereby a tab is only reloaded when activated.
It doesn't seem to be present in the Android version of about:config. I think I could add it manually but it probably won't change anything. I agree with you that, even if this were set to "false," the tab should certainly load when it is selected.
As far as I am aware, the issue has always happened on this phone. I remember being surprised by it when I first bought the phone on November 10th of this year. Before getting my XA2, I never saw this problem on my LG Nexus 5X. Given that FF 63.0.2 was released on Nov 7th, it seems possible that the problem was introduced with that release — my Nexus 5X was "boot-looping" for days before I bought the new one, and probably never ran that version of Firefox.
i usually don't use the feature, but i have been using it recently to test. in my case tabs do load the content upon selection. i can't think of any settings or "conflict" reasons that your issue should occur. hopefully it will be fixed by an update soon. if not, i imagine it is worth a bug report.