Comment 38 for bug 13214

(In reply to comment #22)
> 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.

But it's still true for desktops, which is what a great many people are using.
The laptop scenario you described is a corner case that can be dealt with by
other means.

(In reply to comment #24)
> I understand - it will benefit some users. But imagine for a second if we got
> rid of both XSMP and the Firefox "restore session" dialog.
> Now instead, when your browser started up it was at an about:start page . At
> the top would be a list of the pages you were using in the last session. One
> click on the link would launch it in a new tab. Moreover, after you clicked it
> it would disappear, so if you wanted to restore a bunch of tabs it'd just be
> "click click click click", done. There'd also be a "Open all in tabs" button.

This won't come even close to session restore. A session is not defined by the
set of open pages alone, but also by their grouping into browser windows and
the placement of the windows on the virtual desktops. If there are many pages open
the user would have grouped and arranged them in some sensible fashion and
hence it's import to restore this arrangement too, which the scheme you described
just can not do, yet session restore does it prefectly.