696274 - Session Restore: Switch "Start New Session" and "Restore" buttons

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 477322

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[Jason Bucata]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110702 Gentoo Firefox/3.6.17
Build ID: 20110702004428

Steps to reproduce:

My computer lost power, I restarted and tried to restore my prior Firefox session, which had a lot of windows and tabs open for multiple days.  I went down to click the button on the left which should have been "Restore", but instead was "Start New Session".



Actual results:

I lost all my open sites as a result.



Expected results:

The "Restore" button should be the one on the left.  In nearly every GUI I've used, and in all other dialog boxes in Firefox, the "OK" button is to the left of "Cancel"--that is, the button that means, "yes, please proceed" is to the left of, "no, throw this away and start over".  To be consistent with what has become user intuition, the Restore button should be on the left, as if it were an OK button.

It also doesn't help that the first word of "Start New Session" is "Start"... it's easy to think, "yes, that's what I'm trying to do, is start my Firefox session back up again", but it turns out that "Start" actually means "don't start [this session]".  But I think swapping the button order would fix the problem for sure.

I notice that this help page:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Session%20Restore
shows a screenshot with the buttons swapped as I'm requesting.  Is that from a different version?

Comment 1

[Jason Bucata]

Hmm, interesting, I see now that "OK" is to the right of "Cancel" in most Firefox dialogs... though they're also in the lower right corner instead of the lower left.  Interesting that I hadn't noticed that before, and it hasn't been a problem, even though I'm so used to the opposite.

So maybe another approach is to move those buttons to the right edge?

Comment 2

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

Thanks for the report. It's a problem we've had for a while and we've tried a couple things to fix. See bug 477322 for more details.