666150 - Undo for Start new session

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Session Restore, enhancement)

Description

[era+mozilla]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20110504 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20110504 Firefox/4.0.1

When you accidentally click Start new session (as further discussed in bug #477322, this is not altogether too uncommon), you should be able to Undo.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Crash, or quit, by accident or by choice.  Restart Firefox.  Get Session Restore
2. Accidentally click Start new session


Actual Results:  
New session, apparently losing ability to restore the session you were about to restore.  Undo is greyed out and ctrl-Z does nothing.

History > Restore previous session is also greyed out, for some odd reason (this is probably a separate bug).

Expected Results:  
Undo and ctrl-Z should behave the same as the Back button.

I only discovered the Back button and the about:sessionrestore URL by reading Bugzilla in preparation for filing this bug report.

Although the data loss is only perceived, not real, it appears to the end user as if the session restore data was lost.  As documented in e.g. bug #558425, once you plunge ahead and create a new session, and eventually quit Firefox, the data loss will be committed to disk as well unless you discover in time that the old session data can in fact still be salvaged.

Although fixing bug #648081 would reduce the risk of data loss, the lack of Undo is a usability problem in its own right.

Comment 1

[Paul O'Shannessy [:zpao] (not bugmail, email directly)]

(In reply to comment #0)
> History > Restore previous session is also greyed out, for some odd reason
> (this is probably a separate bug).

I'm leaning towards that being an ok option. See bug 639992.

> Undo and ctrl-Z should behave the same as the Back button.

I disagree. ctrl-z should not have that behavior. Nowhere else in Firefox does undo undo an action taken by a user (outside of text fields). Not only that, but having a single case where undo behaves like the back button would be inconsistent.

We should fix the issues that make it too easy to hit the wrong button and not introduce inconsistent behavior.

Comment 2

[u279076]

That seems like a rational conclusion. Thanks Paul.