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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

About once a week Firefox bans me from opening new tabs until I reboot it for an update. It promises to return my existing tabs but it never has.

For this reason I don't trust it when I'm doing meaningful work.

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I was about ready to murder somebody the second time I ran into that, but some googling gave me the reason: it happens (on GNU/Linux) when you have updated firefox, but you are running the old program. Since opening a new tab opens a new process, this effectively means the old system would have to work intimately with a newer version -- which is too hard.

The solution is the same as always: don't upgrade until you are ready to reboot the system anyways. Or don't upgrade at all, if you can get away with it.

Sometimes I open Chrome, not after any kind of abnormal force-close, and it says something like “your browser profile was corrupt and has been permanently deleted”.

Which browser is good for meaningful work?

Whichever one works best for you.

“Bans” you?

Have you ever applied any of the about:config settings from one of those harmful “privacy” guides? Are you using an enterprise or school managed computer?

I use a session restore add-on to ensure that I have a alternative location for my tabs. Works nice with its periodic backups of session state. Edit: I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m... .

I have never seen such a dialogue. Is this a corporate machine? Perhaps they have implemented some policy to keep the browser up-to-date.

That's interesting, I've never had issues getting old sessions back. You could try recovering it via "History > Recently closed windows", it should be there usually.

You can probably blame the web apps Im using for not saving state... But honestly I shouldn't be banned from opening tabs until I reboot the browser.

I've never had this happen personally. What OS is this? I use Firefox on OSX installed through Homebrew, so I have to manually update it with brew. Firefox has never asked me to update.

Ubuntu bionic. Latest default Firefox without any special enterprise stuff or whatnot.

It happens when you update firefox out from under itself. In other words, don't apply apt updates for firefox until you're ready to restart it.

I've never seen this before, are you sure it's an upstream Firefox thing?

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