1608718 - Immediately remember the sidebar visibility, not when FireFox exits.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Session Restore, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Max Power]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open the sidebar, such as Bookmarks.
2. Close FireFox.
3. Start FireFox and close the sidebar.
4. Without closing the FireFox opened at step 3, open another FireFox.
   • On Windows: by clicking the FireFox icon in the Start Menu or right click the FireFox entry in the Taskbar and click "Open new window"
   • On Linux: by clicking FireFox in the start menu or in the quick launch icon in the task bar.

Actual results:

Every new FireFox window starts with the sidebar open, even though I closed the sidebar for the first window of FireFox. I have to close the sidebar each time.

There seems to be no way to make the sidebar automatically close itself after I clicked a link in the Bookmarks sidebar, unlike Edge which closes the Bookmarks automatically, I sometimes close FireFox with the sidebar open. It is not that I want sidebar to appear every time; it is just that I forget to close the sidebar before FireFox's exit.

The next time I open FireFox, it starts with the sidebar open. Fine, I can close it. But if I open a new FireFox window, I have to close the sidebar again. And again and again for every subsequent new FireFox window, until I close every FireFox with the sidebar closed.

Expected results:

Not opening the sidebar for the subsequent new windows.

If the sidebar automatically gets opened for the first FireFox window just because it was open when FireFox exited last time and I closed the sidebar for the first window, I would not want sidebar to get opened for subsequent new windows.

There could be some ways to improve the current situation, like...

1. Remember the sidebar visibility setting immediately, before FireFox exits, so that the next new window will follow the previous window's sidebar visibility, not that which was stored when FireFox exited last time.

2. Add some settings for the sidebar in the Options, like:
   A. Default visibility for new window like [Show, hide, remember last setting].
   B. Default selected item for new window like [Bookmarks, History, etc].
   C. Automatic sidebar close option when a link of the Bookmarks is clicked.

Comment 1

[yaomtc]

I have Firefox set to reopen all windows and tabs from last time on startup. This does not include panel state, though. I like one window (the larger one) to have the bookmarks panel open, and the other one closed. However on every startup I have to close the bookmarks panel on the smaller one.