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Unusual Tabs lost problem

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John Bird

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May 19, 2010, 4:03:07 AM5/19/10
to dev-apps...@lists.mozilla.org
I had an unusual problem today -

Went to a WIFI cafe, which required a login. Firefox was not running.

On starting Firefox, I found instead of my 107 tabs all different, I had
nearly 107 tabs with the WIFI login page.
After logging in the problem was not over - on each tab there was no history
back-arrow to reclaim the page that should be there.
Closing the browser and restarting gave the same 107 wifi login tabs

I did manage to find in history a list of tabs for today, and opened these
67, and close the 107 tabs of WIFI login, however obviously I lost a lot of
tabs, and I have no idea which ones were lost. Nor does history give any
idea of what was open. Some of the tabs reopened were tabs I remember
looking at and closing. A few tabs that had not loaded by the time I
logged in had the original URL, most had the login page.

Question - in todays or yesterdays history is this a list of pages that were
viewed and either left open or closed - if a tab was not actually viewed
today or yesterday does it show in this history? Note I do usually update
Minefield everyday, so chance are the tabs were reloaded in that period.

Is there a procedure to follow to avoid losing a set of tabs in a case like
this in a WIFI cafe??

In case the wifi was doing anything unusual, here is a sample link

https://login.wifiportal.co.nz/coffeeculture/?res=notyet&uamip=172.18.0.1&uamport=3990&challenge=66043624ddd04bcdc14da94a9d43322d&userurl=&nasid=002369C103C9&mac=00-16-EA-24-A1-06#heating

In some tabs the wifi showed in the favicon part of the site, and the
original URL in the addressbar. As far as I could guess the original URL
could not be found once replaced by the WIFI login page. However I am
intrigued by the #heating in the URL above, as one of the tabs was looking
up a heating information site.

I am not sure anything could be done in Firefox design, except it could be
handy to have some session manager of the previous all tabs open over some
previous hours as an emergency backup in case the set Firefox thinks is open
gets junked.

John Bird


Mounir Lamouri

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May 19, 2010, 9:09:09 AM5/19/10
to
On 05/19/2010 10:03 AM, John Bird wrote:
> Is there a procedure to follow to avoid losing a set of tabs in a case
> like this in a WIFI cafe??

The BarTab extension could help you for that. It will prevent reloading
all the tabs you have every time you are launching Firefox. However, I'm
not sure it will work with Minefield.

By the way, IIRC, Alexander Limi mentioned this extension in this "100
paper cuts" presentation. He told it could be a good improvement for
Firefox's loading time to have this built-in in Firefox instead of
having an extension. It could be great for loading time but it will be
also a UX improvement to prevent this kind of annoyance you mentioned.

--
Mounir

David McRitchie

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May 19, 2010, 9:58:42 PM5/19/10
to
"Mounir Lamouri" ...

Thanks for the extension link. I had already changed about:config
media.autoplay.enabled to false, which stopped videos from starting
if I opened them in the background and that worked fine.

I installed the mentioned "BarTab" extension
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/
Brought up six videos and started them all playing at once
brought Firefox down to save session. Brought Firefox up
and only the active tab would play, the other played when
started -- all good.

Since the was about Wi-Fi, started all six videos playing at once
again, brought Firefox down to save session. Turned off Wi-Fi
brought Firefox up, since the extension sounded like it would
preserve open tabs from cache expected tabs to come up and at least play
what ever parts were loaded. Instead the active tab indicated that
the site was unavailable and went blank and tab changed to
"(untitled)"; each tab did the same as I made it active, so it looked
like there was nothing. Brought Firefox down and expected nothing
to be seen on restart, but the six tabs came up ready to work. The first played,
the others: some were stopped (expected), some were shown as
playing but at the beginning and were not actually playing but could
be jump started by pushing forward a few seconds and thus started playing
a little peculiar but did match the goal of being able to play only when
called upon. So it would seem that you must have the Wi-Fi connection
up before starting Firefox to be able to continue with what you have
otherwise everything disappears, but may reappear when Firefox is
restarted with Wi-Fi already up. (Firefox 3.6.3 running on Windows 7).
So that may help during testing.



John Bird

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May 20, 2010, 1:08:04 AM5/20/10
to dev-apps...@lists.mozilla.org
I loaded this Bartab extension - it requires the Addon Compatibility
Reporter extension also to get it working - the developer says although not
"officially" supported for Minefield he does try to keep it current.

For those not familiar, looks like it has options for background tabs - they
can be silenced/unloaded (if not recently visited)/ prevented from complete
reload on restarting of Firefox. Tabs reload or refresh only when you
switch to them, and specified sites will be kept fresh up to date.

I have 105 Tabs open, Minefield is using no CPU and 168MB mem (working set)
or 290MB (Virtual) - which looks a lot, lot leaner than I have seen before.

This looks like a terrific addition - as you said it could well be
considered an addition to the core Firefox - eg a general setting of

"Responsiveness:
- (option) Set to use minimal resources (update tabs only when viewed)
- (option) Set to be fastest responding (keep tabs up to date)
"

It looks to me that content on background tabs - flash etc here and there is
turned off in all the background tabs - now this is a really good idea!
Is this really what it is doing? If so then isolating each Tab, or
supplying a CPU monitor for each tab becomes much less urgent - this
achieves the main goal of focusing Firefox's activity on active tabs only.

[Previous]


On 05/19/2010 10:03 AM, John Bird wrote:
> Is there a procedure to follow to avoid losing a set of tabs in a case
> like this in a WIFI cafe??

The BarTab extension could help you for that. It will prevent reloading
all the tabs you have every time you are launching Firefox. However, I'm
not sure it will work with Minefield.

By the way, IIRC, Alexander Limi mentioned this extension in this "100
paper cuts" presentation. He told it could be a good improvement for
Firefox's loading time to have this built-in in Firefox instead of
having an extension. It could be great for loading time but it will be
also a UX improvement to prevent this kind of annoyance you mentioned.

--
Mounir

John Bird


Art Kocsis

unread,
May 20, 2010, 12:48:42 PM5/20/10
to Moz FF Devel List
John,

Try the session manager extension:
http://sessionmanager.mozdev.org/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2324/
Load your tabs, save as a named session then available to reload at any time.

HTH, Art

At 05-19-10 01:03, you wrote:
>I had an unusual problem today -
>
>Went to a WIFI cafe, which required a login. Firefox was not running.
>
>On starting Firefox, I found instead of my 107 tabs all different, I had
>nearly 107 tabs with the WIFI login page.
>After logging in the problem was not over - on each tab there was no
>history back-arrow to reclaim the page that should be there.
>Closing the browser and restarting gave the same 107 wifi login tabs

><snip>

Nathan Tuggy

unread,
May 23, 2010, 1:16:45 PM5/23/10
to
On 2010-05-19 22:08, John Bird wrote:
> I loaded this Bartab extension - it requires the Addon Compatibility
> Reporter extension also to get it working - the developer says although
> not "officially" supported for Minefield he does try to keep it current.
>
> For those not familiar, looks like it has options for background tabs -
> they can be silenced/unloaded (if not recently visited)/ prevented from
> complete reload on restarting of Firefox. Tabs reload or refresh only
> when you switch to them, and specified sites will be kept fresh up to date.

It's not so much "up to date" as "loaded/available" -- BarTab
essentially splits the browser into a loaded Firefox instance and a
hypothetical unloaded/not-running instance, with tabs in each. So when
you activate a tab, you can think of it as moving it into the loaded
instance.

> I have 105 Tabs open, Minefield is using no CPU and 168MB mem (working
> set) or 290MB (Virtual) - which looks a lot, lot leaner than I have seen
> before.
>
> This looks like a terrific addition - as you said it could well be
> considered an addition to the core Firefox - eg a general setting of
>
> "Responsiveness:
> - (option) Set to use minimal resources (update tabs only when viewed)
> - (option) Set to be fastest responding (keep tabs up to date)
> "
>
> It looks to me that content on background tabs - flash etc here and
> there is turned off in all the background tabs - now this is a really
> good idea! Is this really what it is doing?

Yes, it is -- BarTab treats inactive tabs as though they are not loaded
in Firefox at all, and restores them using the built-in session store
management.

> If so then isolating each
> Tab, or supplying a CPU monitor for each tab becomes much less urgent -
> this achieves the main goal of focusing Firefox's activity on active
> tabs only.
>
> [Previous]
> On 05/19/2010 10:03 AM, John Bird wrote:
>> Is there a procedure to follow to avoid losing a set of tabs in a case
>> like this in a WIFI cafe??
>
> The BarTab extension could help you for that. It will prevent reloading
> all the tabs you have every time you are launching Firefox. However, I'm
> not sure it will work with Minefield.
>
> By the way, IIRC, Alexander Limi mentioned this extension in this "100
> paper cuts" presentation. He told it could be a good improvement for
> Firefox's loading time to have this built-in in Firefox instead of
> having an extension. It could be great for loading time but it will be
> also a UX improvement to prevent this kind of annoyance you mentioned.
>
> --
> Mounir
>
> John Bird
>
>

--
Nathan Tuggy [:tuggyne]
nat...@tuggycomputer.com

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