Old tabs will not load and long-pressing on them crashes Firefox
I'm having the same problem as this guy.
I have a large number of open tabs in Firefox on my iPhone, a mixture of old and very old. I've been trying to go through the tabs and deal with them -- in some sense they are all todo items that I left open at least semi-deliberately.
If I tap on a thumbnail to load a tab, Firefox instead loads a blank page. If I tap the address bar after that, Firefox loads the new tab page, not the site corresponding to the tab that I selected. If I tap and hold a tab's thumbnail, Firefox crashes.
It was the case temporarily (possibly a bug) that some of these tabs would place a TLS failure icon in the left of the address bar when selected, while the blank page was displayed. Tapping on that would display the tab title, but not the tab URL. No longer is that TLS failure icon ever visible.
All Replies (7)
Hi ffox10,
Sorry about this. Does it happen consistently or intermittenly? Also, how comfortable are you with sharing the crash report? I look in our repository, but I don't think this issue has been reported before. So it'll be great if you can help us investigate the issue further.
To quote Paul on the other thread, this article will walk you through getting both crash logs and Firefox logs. When you have them, please file them here (a GitHub account is required) so that our developers can look into this further for you.
It happens consistently, and I've seen a couple tabs from sometime in the past, say, couple months, go from being usable to being in this state, just recently.
Currently, without having a way to get an easy count, I'd guess I have around 300 old tabs open on my phone, none of which will load or can be usefully interacted with.
I have tab syncing turned on but they won't sync either. On the desktop browser, "Firefox on iPhone" shows "No open tabs". If I open a couple new tabs and reload the "Synced Tabs" view, then only those two show up under "Firefox on iPhone".
I'll look into creating a Github account and posting logs and so on, but I can't make any promises -- it's a lot of tedious work for what I suspect is an equally bad outcome (complete non-access to my historical data), for an issue that seems like it must be unavoidable for anyone who keeps a large number of old tabs around (and thus should have already been found and addressed if anybody's dogfooding this app). I'm on the current version of iOS and Firefox Mobile. How rare could this scenario possibly be?
Modified by ffox10
That is a very large number of tabs to have open on a mobile device. Are you able to close down a fair number without opening them?
To be fair, 300 is a very small percentage of "infinite", which is the number of tabs that the UI implies it supports. (I thought there was some kind of "Infinite Tabs" branding around Firefox Mobile at one point, but I can't find the old release notes or press release or whatever.)
I'm not particularly willing to close any tabs without opening them. Firefox Mobile doesn't give me a way to look at even complete page titles or URLs associated with these tabs, and the thumbnails are often not descriptive enough to find the pages out on the web either.
What brought about my complaint originally was, I noticed that I had a large number of tabs open, and decided to start reviewing and closing them, and then didn't get very far.
I don't think that closing tabs is likely to be a fruitful troubleshooting step, since it was always the case that openable-vs-non-openable varied from tab to tab, with recent tabs tending to be successful and older tabs failing.
Modified by ffox10
ffox10 said
I'll look into creating a Github account and posting logs and so on, but I can't make any promises -- it's a lot of tedious work for what I suspect is an equally bad outcome (complete non-access to my historical data), for an issue that seems like it must be unavoidable for anyone who keeps a large number of old tabs around (and thus should have already been found and addressed if anybody's dogfooding this app). I'm on the current version of iOS and Firefox Mobile. How rare could this scenario possibly be?
I understand the reluctance to file a bug. I just dig into our repository and found this. Do you think it's the same issue with what that you experience? There's also a recording that you can watch to make sure.
Kiki said
I understand the reluctance to file a bug. I just dig into our repository and found this. Do you think it's the same issue with what that you experience? There's also a recording that you can watch to make sure.
Thanks for going to the effort to look that up. That's almost certain to be the same issue or set of issues that I'm seeing. The video only shows the crash, not the behavior when one of the tabs is tapped on, but the crashing part is identical to my experience, and so are the descriptions in the comments.
ffox10 said
Thanks for going to the effort to look that up. That's almost certain to be the same issue or set of issues that I'm seeing. The video only shows the crash, not the behavior when one of the tabs is tapped on, but the crashing part is identical to my experience, and so are the descriptions in the comments.
Thanks for confirming. I haven't seen a lot of traction from the team in this particular issue. But I'll make sure to flag this internally.
Sorry again for the inconvenience!
Modified by Kiki