Hi Zhong An, that is how other versions of Firefox work -- when you quit, the private tabs are gone. I don't know why iOS was different before, but it sounds like it changed. Maybe I can find some discussion about why...

(I couldn't find an explanation)

Yea I understand that, but in the private browsing page for firefox ios it is explicitly mentioned that private tabs stay open until you close them. Mine are just kind of arbitrarily disappearing. I THINK they close whenever the app does a background refresh and they definitely close when I close the app and open it again. I looked through changelogs and couldn't find anything about it...

Thanks for checking as well though!

See also:

• https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/private-tabs-ios-no-longer-automatically-stay-open-since-new/m-p/59620

• 1902899 - Private tabs disappeared after update to Firefox 127 on iOS
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html

Thank you for the links, glad that I'm not the only one struggling with this. I hope this is fixed or rolled back eventually.

Is there any way to recover the tabs?

Even if they did this to make the iOS version behave like the other platforms, and even if they did it to better assure privacy, it was a big change to make without a heads up and without guidance for migrating or recovering the tabs. I just wanted to do my normal stuff today rather than spend that time figuring out what happened to everything and now apparently having to recreate all my private tabs as normal tabs.

See also the discussion here:

• https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/20073