Comment 28 for bug 13214

The X session management stuff is pretty broken from a modern design standpoint. Here's the problem - it assumes that when you resume your session, the world is in exactly the same state it was before, and so every app can resume perfectly.

That was largely true when X all about thin clients connecting to large Unix timesharing servers. But it's not so true for personal laptops.

Here's a simple example: I'm at home, browsing the web, and have Firefox open with 20 tabs. I shut down my computer, head to a coffee shop. I open my laptop, and get logged in. If I hit the box "save my session" on shutdown, then what happens is Firefox starts up, and all 20 tabs go to...the coffee shop wifi login redirector.

Another example is Pidgin - it can't restore the state of your conversation windows until you're actually signed in. And that signed-in state could depend on many external factors.

At a high level, the whole thing is obviously broken because you have to explicitly checkpoint your desktop, like a human filesystem journal.

I'm not saying Firefox shouldn't add this - I'm sure there are people out there who don't have working suspend on their Linux computer, and so want session management as a hack around that.

But what I think Firefox should concentrate on instead is making it extremely convenient and easy to get to the sites that one uses most. The "Open all in tabs" bookmark thing is going in this direction. The current "restore session" dialog is also like this, although it's all-or-nothing. The work Bryan and I did on the Firefox Journal (http://clarkbw.net/blog/2007/09/12/firefox-journal/) was thinking about exactly this problem. Need to resurrect it...