385084 - session restore should remember if the bookmark manager dialog (and other dialogs, like download manager) were open

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Session Restore, enhancement)

Description

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

including in here would be quitting and getting the new michael wu prompt to remember state.

on restart, should we re-open the application dialogs that were open before?

Comment 1

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

Yeah, I think it makes sense to restore the session in as much detail as possible.

Comment 2

[Simon Bünzli]

(In reply to comment #1)
> I think it makes sense to restore the session in as much detail as possible.

So we'd best just write out a memory dump at shutdown and resume from there... ;-)

Seriously: Reopening non-browser windows at startup will (1) get people asking for preserving them in case of a crash and (2) having them in as far as possible the same state they were. That would mean figuring out (i) what state is important for every possible window (e.g. scroll positions, applied filters, sort ordering, etc.), (ii) how to detect state changes efficiently and (iii) how to restore them properly.

One half-way reasonable option would be to offer a new function on our API to pass the chrome URL to reopen and a string argument to pass (from which the window itself can restore the state) and have the windows themselves call that function whenever something relevant changes. That would move all points (i) to (iii) to where those things are best known and lets extensions take advantage of the same functionality without us having to guess for them.

Suggestion:
/**
 * @param aWindow is the window whose state should be restored
 * @param aState  is a string which will be passed to the window as only
 *                argument when it is restored (state information is
 *                deleted if null is passed instead of a string)
 */
void saveDialogState(in nsIDOMWindow aWindow, in AString aState)

State information will be dropped when the window is no longer open (listed by the nsIWindowMediator) or when null is passed as state.

Shared dialogs (from Toolkit) might need a browser-only component to do this for them, though, since we won't want references to nsISessionStore where that interface might never exist at all.

Comment 4

[Simon Bünzli]

Generalizing Session Restore for Toolkit as proposed in bug 449967 would make this simpler.

Comment 6

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

Adjusting summary from question to statement

Comment 7

[Sam Foster [:sfoster] (he/him)]

I'm not sure what the use case is for this. Please re-open if you think its necessary.