I get the feeling that Firefox has become a playground for irresponsible children. These changes have nothing to do with improved functionality, security or important bug fixes. They are gratuitous changes that detract from the user experience. I continue to use Firefox because the Mozilla foundation has had the foresight to make a browser that encourages people to make and deploy add-ons such as no-script and BetterPrivacy. If I had access to a stable branch that just had bug fixes and security patches applied I would prefer to use that. A constantly shifting foundation makes a difficult target for developers and users.

No reply since yesterday should I file a bug report?

Many requests for help come in all the time. Sometimes, one gets missed.

Let me check, Firefox crashes, but does not return to the pages that were up at the time of the crash.

In the address bar, type about:crashes<enter>. Note: If any reports do not have BP in front of the numbers/letters, click it and select Submit.

Using your mouse, mark the most resent 7 - 10 crash reports, and copy them. Now go to the reply box below and paste them in.

Please read this article; http://kb.mozillazine.org/Session_Restore

Also, look under Troubleshooting.

Humm... OK. This advice is not very helpful. about:crashes lists a total of three crashes in the last month: bp-227fbc6e-24a5-4e59-b1f6-487662150604 6/4/2015 12:18 PM bp-4d6d15b4-b132-4153-b3e2-ee37e2150603 6/3/2015 9:11 PM 307f0d56-bf33-447e-8e74-c472d68862b2 5/3/2015 12:53 AM

These seem to be only events that triggered the crash reporter. I get an average of two crashes a day and most of the time the crash reporter does not run. I have had something like 60 to 80 crashes during that time. Therefore almost none of the data is available. As you might imagine, It is super important to me that the crash recovery work at least as well as it did two weeks ago. Moreover this is not addressing my question. How do I get the old tab behavior?

New and undesirable things I have noticed include:

• ) closing a tab in a multi-tab browser window does unexpected and unequivocally bad things. For instance, attached is a screen shot of a firefox window showing what should be two tabs. Instead I see a tab showing a search result on an unrelated web site, and in the window I see a youtube video. I have no way to move this image into another browser or it's own window. It is a floating "tab". The video plays, but if I close the other tab ( labeled "recent posts page 7" ) both "tabs" close. Nor does the video show under recently closed tabs in history.
• ) As I pointed out in my previous post, when a tab is closed I just see a blank browser window. I am sure that this is not intended behavior. See the screen shot from my previous post.
• ) Recent changes in tab handling have rendered the tab preview in windows useless. See my previous post for an example.

All of these issues, including the crash recovery problem, started after version 38.0.1 auto-installed. What steps can I take to roll back to the previous configuration?

Product Firefox Version 38.0.5 Channel release OS Windows NT OS Version 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1

One crash report flagged;

Date Processed 2015-06-03 19:11 msmpeg2vdec.dll = Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder

The other flagged;

Product Firefox Version 38.0.1 Date Processed 2015-06-04 10:19

Signature hang

Process Type plugin Shockwave Flash Version:17.0.0.169

Security Issue: Update your Flash Player Version 17.0.0.188
https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html

See if there are updates for your graphics drivers https://support.mozilla.org/kb/upgrade-graphics-drivers-use-hardware-acceleration

Thank you for your generous offer of time and assistant to inspect and resolve my problem. Your suggestion to upgrade my flash and graphics drivers was thoughtful. After upgrading I find that the problem I described in detail above has not been resolved. Please help me to write a professional bug report so that the issue can be dealt with thoroughly.

You may have a corrupt sessionstore file.

Type about:support in the address bar and press enter.

Under the page logo on the left side you will see Application Basics. Under this find Profile Folder. To it’s right press the button Show Folder. This will open your file browser to the current Firefox profile. Now Close Firefox.

Locate all of the sessionstore files, and delete them. Restart Firefox.

Hi mellpell,

Just thought I would chip in here, briefly.

The problems you see do not seem to be caused directly by any Firefox upgrade changes. You should follow Fred's suggestions to try to get to the root of these problems.

It may help testing Firefox with Flashplayer disabled. Do you only get problems when Flashplayer is enabled ? It is worth noting you should be able to use YouTube without needing Flashplayer

• Check and modify settings at https://www.youtube.com/html5
• Also you may need to update FlashPlayer yet again check at https://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ where a download of 18.0.0.160 is available.

Additionally

• Try out the third party unofficial build Firefox portable ESR; installed as a separate additional browser http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox-portable-esr

That can be useful for troubleshooting and testing as it installs easily as a fresh browser, without changing the current main Firefox browser.

A further note possibly a bit late, but renaming files is better than deleting them, as it often deactivates them. For instance you may not wish to lose open session tabs almost irretrievably.

For background information note the sessionstore system was revamped a few versions ago. That should not be causing you problems, it should mean you're less likely to have any. I wrote a while ago:

/questions/1041506} ... a few links about the improved session restore system introduced in Firefox 33 I haven't tried to manually restore anything since then, and that itself is probably an indication that the new system is more robust and reliable.

• A fairly short straightforward blog, but easy to understand and lists the files involved. http://www.ghacks.net/2014/06/27/mozilla-launches-improved-session-restore-firefox-33/
• More background and detail Firefox, the Browser that has your Back[up]
• For completeness, an public Mozilla document, about the issues involved https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/session_restore

Many Thanks for looking into my issue. This will be quick as I need to get to bed. In brief, I renamed my profile folder and uninstalled firefox and removed all the registry keys could find. I then reinstalled and moved my places, keys and logins db files to the new profile directory. I reinstalled some of my plugins, but not Java or Flash. The only extension I have installed is foxit reader. Firefox is no longer forgetting it's tabs after crashing, but the situation shown in screenshot one is still going on. I just got everything running so I have not had time to experiment. More tomorrow.

-Mell

After researching the issue it looks like the problem was a misconfiguration of NoScript. After restoring NoScript to defaults the tab issue is gone.

Thanks for your help.

-Mell

(~J99) Also note

mellpell said

It looks like this is a known issue with Image Tweek: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=14029673#p14029673 https://github.com/CAFxX/ImageTweak/issues/37 https://github.com/CAFxX/ImageTweak/issues/40

Good to hear you fixed the problem. Thanks for posting back.

Seems rather surprising NoScript caused a problem with session tabs. I will mark your last answer as solving this.

Just as matter of interest can you re-create the problem by changing a no script setting. What is that setting and its value, and what does it do cause Firefox to hang ?

_{edit typos}

A deeper dive leads me to conclude that the problem is an interaction between Image Tweek and NoScript. I still don't know what the problem was because it depended on the old configuration of NoScript which I erased. In addition the problem seems to be flaky. It went away for a while after I re-enabled NoScript.

-Mell

It looks like this is a known issue with Image Tweek: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=14029673#p14029673 https://github.com/CAFxX/ImageTweak/issues/37 https://github.com/CAFxX/ImageTweak/issues/40