Unexpected behavior after relaunch (macOS)

[justanotheranonymoususer]

Description

There's an issue I saw several times on Mac with browser relaunch. If an update is available, and relaunch is triggered from a non-update-related flow, weird stuff is happening.

Steps to Reproduce

It's tricky to reproduce because you need to have a browser with a pending update. I'm not sure that the steps are precise but I believe it's something similar.

1. Launch Brave on Mac and wait for an update to be available and pending.
2. Go to chrome://flags.
3. Change a flag, you'll see a button to relaunch the browser.
4. Click the button to relaunch the browser.

Actual result:

Things break. One time the browser crashed. Other time it launched but was just a blank window, without tabs or URL bar or anything at all.

Expected result:

Proper relaunch.

Reproduces how often:

Intermittent issue.

Brave version (brave://version info)

Latest Mac and latest Brave.

Version/Channel Information:

Didn't try but pretty sure it's not channel-specific.

Other Additional Information:

I'm pretty sure it's related to these changes:

• Fix relaunch fail after update on mac brave-core#1041
• Use sparkle's relaunch api for update recommend dialog brave-core#1046

I tried to contribute a fix but gave up. What I figured is that there are two ways to relaunch a browser: with Chromium functions and with code from Sparkle. The Chromium functions only work when no update is pending, and the Sparkle function only works when an update is pending. But Brave doesn't check whether an update is pending. Instead, it tries to guess, e.g. if you're on chrome://flag, chances are no update is pending. This assumption can often be incorrect.

What I tried to do is changing Sparkle's relaunch function to handle the case of no pending update and just return false instead of throwing an assert. Then, this code can be used in Brave (pseudo code):

bool relaunched = [sparkle_glue relaunch];
if (!relaunched) {
  chrome::relaunch();
}

But as I said, changing Sparkle and the Objective C code was too much for me.

• Does the issue resolve itself when disabling Brave Shields? Unrelated
• Does the issue resolve itself when disabling Brave Rewards? Unrelated
• Is the issue reproducible on the latest version of Chrome? No, Chrome doesn't use Sparkle on Mac

Miscellaneous Information:

[rebron]

Hi @justanotheranonymoususer Can you post the version you're using from here brave://version
example below. Select and copy through User Agent and paste. Also, what macOS version are you using.

Brave	1.45.68 Chromium: 106.0.5249.55 (Official Build) beta (arm64)
Revision	4d5f098fca6ab7f4b6b7c240be3d9593c2357709-refs/branch-heads/5249@{#531}
OS	macOS Version 13.0 (Build 22A5342f)
JavaScript	V8 10.6.194.11
User Agent	Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

[simonhong]

@justanotheranonymoususer Thanks for reporting!
I didn't check yet with your scenario but I think it could be possible.
I'll take a look soon.

I think all macOS relaunch code path should be like below

if ([sparkle_glue recentStatus] == kAutoupdateInstalled) {
  [sparkle_glue relaunch];
} else {
  chrome::relaunch();
}

[justanotheranonymoususer]

I think all macOS relaunch code path should be like below

if ([sparkle_glue recentStatus] == kAutoupdateInstalled) {
  [sparkle_glue relaunch];
} else {
  chrome::relaunch();
}

I actually thought about that, but I was afraid that the return value of recentStatus can be stale. There's the comment here ("a new update may have been installed in the background"):

https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/c86643363ad532e2cda935430bea1cd3c024ab91/chromium_src/chrome/browser/ui/webui/help/version_updater_mac.mm#L98-L101

[simonhong]

I actually thought about that, but I was afraid that the return value of recentStatus can be stale. There's the comment here ("a new update may have been installed in the background"):

I think that comment should be updated. AFAIK, sparkle doesn't install new update if there is already installed one.
When I restart from relaunch button at relaunch modal or brave://settings/help, sometimes I can get new update from brave://settings/help right after relaunch.

[LaurenWags]

Maybe related to #11055? cc @rebron

[simonhong]

Maybe related to #11055? cc @rebron

Yes, correct. @rebron I think this could happen more frequently as we are adding more Relaunch buttons in settings.
I'm on this now.