Tabs replaced with unknown code
Hello I have a bunch of tabs, and some of them get periodically replaced with some javascript code? I'm not sure, but i did find a few people that have exactly the same problem:
http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread.php/161366-Code-in-Firefox-after-closing-all-tabs
And further this:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/Internet_Email/Web_Browsers/Q_28246484.html
Now ,my pc is windows 7 ,running whatever the last version (always up to date) of firefox was at the time (a few months ago it started and then happened a few times)
I still have the tabs sitting like there like that , and would appreciate if there's a solution. I would like a solution to prevent it from happening again and i want to understand what the meaning of the code is and if there's somewhere within it that i can find the lost webpages.
Thank you
All Replies (20)
You can check for problems with the sessionstore.js file in the Firefox profile folder that store session data.
- Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Multiple_profile_files_created
Deleting sessionstore.js will cause App Tabs and Tab Groups and open and closed (undo) tabs to get lost and you will have to recreate them (make a note or bookmark them if possible).
jscher2000 said
Hi shadyz, I just re-read your post and noticed this: The non-hidden ones are some kind of error that happens ,firefox crashes and then the new session has these coded messages instead of 1/4th of my tabs. Does this problem appear only after a session restore (either at startup, on demand, or recovering from a crash)? This could indicate a problem with corruption in your session history file(s).
Yes sorry if I didn't explain it properly. But basically the point is , that yes , I do a session restore every time ,that's why I'm saying the tabs are replaced , because they were normal before the session restore.
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cor-el said
You can check for problems with the sessionstore.js file in the Firefox profile folder that store session data.Deleting sessionstore.js will cause App Tabs and Tab Groups and open and closed (undo) tabs to get lost and you will have to recreate them (make a note or bookmark them if possible).
- Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Multiple_profile_files_created
I'm not sure i understand you correctly. Did you find something in my troubleshooting information? I haven't deleted the sessionstore.js
And I think i might have two profiles, which i'm not sure ,but could potentially be from some kind of backup i did like 2 years ago.
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FredMcD said
BTW, the last page you posted is computer code.
It's computer code? What's computer code, and is it readable? Like can i find the links i've lost somehow in that code?
jscher2000 said
This is a guess, but I have to think that only a video downloader or other Youtube-related extension would be doing this.
Well i would think that as well, but i have another pc that has all the other youtube extentions ,including the old ones ,which i'm thinking were worse, because people were complaining about them ,and they were giving me issues as well,but on that PC (from which i'm writing right now) ,i don't have any of these issues. And i have the same session restore extention on this PC as well,so you would think if it's some kind of interraction between the addons , this pc should have those (computer code) errors, but it doesn't.
I think there's definitely an issue with the firefox that is outside of whatever is going on on the other pc (second pc) , because there's lots of tab issues that are relevant only for the first pc.
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I just want to mention another error that just happened to me again today. Every 7 days exactly, my bookmarks file loses about 300kb, in this last case it lost exactly: 338,880 bytes , but i think it varies around that number a bit. 338880 bytes is the most accurate number i've gotten ,because i've been trying to time it. I really want to understand how and why it keeps happening, so i can fix it. Isn't it weird that it happens every 7 days exactly? It's sunday morning right now. It has happened probably 10 times , each time is about 7 days from each other, i'm sure especially about the last couple of times. I really want to make firefox better as well, i think you guys and mozilla as a whole are doing a great job, it's my favourite browser and chrome shouldn't take any of our soldiers.
I think i installed the febe,cleo and opie addons around the time it started happening. How can i check when i installed them? Maybe it has to do with opie and cleo, i might uninstall them and see if it happens again in a week, right? Does anyone know of that happening to anyone else? Maybe we can compare addons and settings and whatever else there is
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It's computer code? What's computer code, and is it readable? Like can i find the links i've lost somehow in that code?
excerpt from; http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/Internet_Email/Web_Browsers/Q_28246484.html
(function(){var f,aa=aa||{},l=this;function n(a,b){for(var c=a.split("."),d=b||l,e;e=c.shift();)if(null!=d[e])d=d[e];else return null;return d}function ba(){}function ca(a){a.getInstance=function(){return a.gq?a.gq:a.gq=new a}} function da(a){var b=typeof a;if("object"==b)if(a){if(a instanceof Array)return"array";if(a instanceof Object)return b;var c=Object.prototype.toString.call(a);if("[object Window]"==c)return"object";
This is part of a program that tells the computer what to do. There are about 1000 lines of code.
shadyz said
I just want to mention another error that just happened to me again today. Every 7 days exactly, my bookmarks file loses about 300kb, in this last case it lost exactly: 338,880 bytes I think i installed the febe,cleo and opie addons around the time it started happening. How can i check when i installed them? Maybe it has to do with opie and cleo, i might uninstall them and see if it happens again in a week, right?
Have you noticed if any bookmarks or history is missing? Febe and Opie will save your data, and only restore it when they are told. For now, what you could do is have Febe save every time Firefox closes. You could compare the backup files to see if there are any differences.
It is possible the size change is from data compression, not data loss. You will have to look thru those files and check them.
Hi shadyz, regarding bookmarks: what file is it that is losing 300KB in size?
Regarding the tabs that restore incorrectly, were they previously normal Youtube tabs? Or did they contain embedded Youtube videos?
Also, are you using the Session Manager extension? I'm not sure how it interacts with automatically restoring your previous session in Firefox's Options dialog; it might not be a factor.
jscher2000 said
Hi shadyz, regarding bookmarks: what file is it that is losing 300KB in size?
The bookmarks.html file.
Hi shadyz, are you using the built-in auto-export to create bookmarks.html when you exit Firefox? (That involves setting browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML to true in about:config.) Or does one of your extensions maintain the file??
I don't know why that file size would vary. If you check the bookmark count coded into the names of the backup files in the bookmarkbackups folder, does that seem to be shrinking?
bookmarks-2014-12-08_8984_checksum-gibberish==.jsonlz4
browser.bookmarks.autoExport says value: false
What i do is I backup my bookmarks through ctr+shift+b -> export to html and every 7 days the export i've made on the 7th day is 300kb less than what it should be , or 300kb less than the previous export i've made on the 6th day. I only started making exports each day when i found out about this bug. It would be nice if there was a way to export the bookmarks with one click of the mouse, because the febe addon is quite a heavy-duty addon.
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jscher2000 said
Regarding the tabs that restore incorrectly, were they previously normal Youtube tabs? Or did they contain embedded Youtube videos?
I can't be 100% sure what the tabs were. I don't think they were embedded youtube videos , i think at best they were just youtube videos. I would say there's a 99% chance that at least 1 or 2 of those pages were youtube videos and about 80% chance that all of them were youtube videos. But it's possible there are some other links that got replaced, Especially when you look at the hidden tabs ,of which there are probably tens if not close to a hundred of them:
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FredMcD said
Have you noticed if any bookmarks or history is missing?
I'm actually not sure how to find out ,since it's quite a big bookmarks file ,but if i had to guess i would lean in favour of it being data loss instead of compression... Why would it happen every 7 days? Do you know how i can be able to tell other than going through all the bookmarks?
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I'm going to suggest disabling each of these extensions for a day to see whether new tabs stop getting created. While I can't say for certain that either causes this individually, one of them may be interacting with the other or with another extension to cause this problem:
- "Flash and Video Download"
- "DownloadHelper"
You can disable extensions on the Add-ons page. Either:
- Ctrl+Shift+a
- "3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons
In the left column, click Extensions. Active extensions are listed first, with disabled extensions below on a gray background.
Often a link will appear above at least one disabled extension to restart Firefox. You can complete your work on the tab and click one of the links as the last step.
Let us know if you notice any changes.
That might be a good idea for the bookmarks. I might turn off extentions to see if the bookmarks issue happens again in 6 days.
But the tabs themselves are created very infrequently, i guess something overloads or something happens and the tabs get changed that way, and it hasn't happened in quite a while i dont think. Unless i've missed something,i think even the hidden tabs are month(s) old. As far as the tabs go , right now i'm primarily more interested in figuring out what they were before they got changed, but the real bugging issue is the bookmarks one, because it keeps happening every week. And i don't think it necessarily happens on shutting firefox down, i think it just happens regardless. Is there a page that explains the firefox bookmarks "compression" ? Is there a maximum size that a bookmarks.html file can reach or something like that?
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Regarding bookmarks, the .html files are not compressed.
If you use a file comparison program like WinMerge, can you spot the differences between the files from consecutive days where the size changes?
jscher2000 said
Regarding bookmarks, the .html files are not compressed. If you use a file comparison program like WinMerge, can you spot the differences between the files from consecutive days where the size changes? http://winmerge.org/
That is an interesting program. Not sure i'm doing this right, but there's a bunch of yellow lines and when i copy paste one of them from both files in a wordpad they seem different from one file to the next:
<DT><A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pericoronitis" ADD_DATE="1378929058" LAST_MODIFIED="1378929058" ICON_URI="http://bits.wikimedia.org/favicon/wikipedia.ico" ICON="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQCAYAAAAf8/9hAAAA7klEQVQ4ja2TUZFDIQxFQUUkREQURAoSMIADLGAgNjCAgcjg7scW5tFuu9PtZoaPADkhNySEm8058c4KV3s3+ID8NXhDPgb03iEiCCGg1oo5J1R1++4OEYGIwN3RWgMRQVUxxvh+gbsjxggzw/KZ+QC6+84qIo8lqOpxsDKZGUopx/4CH4DeO0II6L3vQ2YGMx81q+pzEVX1uJBSAhHhmiTn/BxgZogxYoyxgUSE1toGXrX4sY3MjJwzzAy1VpRSwMxwd6SUfv8HrTXEGHcpq0Micujz8iMR0aF0SulBvJeApcF13df+L/Pw0USuuC9zNVPvSNmuzAAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==">Pericoronitis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</A>
By the way the <DT> from the first one dissapears when i post it here, this forum might be changing the code a bit that way. Does this code represent the folder name that the bookmark is in ?
The first line is from the bigger file ,the 6th day bookmark, and the second is from the 7th day smaller bookmark.
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Regarding DT, the forum tries to process some HTML tags, shows others literally, and eats others. It's a little hard to predict without going into the wiki documentation...
It looks to me like the only difference between the two is the encoded favicon data. When I paste each of the data URIs for the images into the address bar in a separate tab and press Enter to render them, I can't see any difference. (Screen shot of the Image Info attached for comparison)
It's hard to guess why that would change on only one day of the week. ??? Maybe if we file a bug about it someone who has worked on this part of Firefox will know.
data:image/png;base64,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
data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQCAYAAAAf8/9hAAAA7klEQVQ4ja2TUZFDIQxFQUUkREQURAoSMIADLGAgNjCAgcjg7scW5tFuu9PtZoaPADkhNySEm8058c4KV3s3+ID8NXhDPgb03iEiCCGg1oo5J1R1++4OEYGIwN3RWgMRQVUxxvh+gbsjxggzw/KZ+QC6+84qIo8lqOpxsDKZGUopx/4CH4DeO0II6L3vQ2YGMx81q+pzEVX1uJBSAhHhmiTn/BxgZogxYoyxgUSE1toGXrX4sY3MjJwzzAy1VpRSwMxwd6SUfv8HrTXEGHcpq0Micujz8iMR0aF0SulBvJeApcF13df+L/Pw0USuuC9zNVPvSNmuzAAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==
Anyway, it doesn't sound like the URLs of the pages themselves are getting lost, so that's good news.
Yeah i would be interested in why it happens every 7th day,also i do have some rare issues with the icons where they don't show up or they change , for example i have one link that's showing a reddit icon when it's not a reddit link, but that's very rare.