Tab Mix?
I'm not sure if regular old me is allowed to edit the main page even for this, so I'm just going to mention it here. AFAIK, it's Tab Mix Plus that does session saving and whatnot, not regular Tab Mix. -- Matt Nordhoff (talk) 00:34, 9 Feb 2006 (PST)
Security of saved data
Just as a precaution, the data that is saved in order to restore the session should be safe from potential reading. For example, you have several tabs open and some form information filled in on one, including your banking details. The session saver saves these details in order to restart Firefox, but afterwards when the user is finished and they close the browser, is this information left laying about on the hard disk, that could potentially be stolen by rogue software or exploits.
Also what would happen if after a restart by session saver, you cleared the history with Ctrl+Alt+Del. Even though the history would be removed from the browser cache, would the session saver cache be removed also to ensure that URLs and Form text were not left behind?
- Kroc 01:32, 9 Feb 2006 (PST)
Restoring after voluntary exit not optional
The main page currently (2006-02-13) lists this as an optional (P2, FF3 or left to extensions) feature:
"Allow session restoration after voluntary application closure"
From my point of view, this is not an optional feature. The only time I ever make Firefox exit is to work around some bug (e.g., using too much memory, incapable of handling new extensions without restart, etc.). Otherwise my invocation of Firefox would run forever. Thus, for me, every manual exit of Firefox is undesired and equivalent to a forced crash. Generally I have dozens of tabs representing weeks or months of work that I definitely do not want to lose! If this feature was missing I would have to continue using SessionSaver, which would be undesirable.
Joe --Sllewbj 05:27, 13 Feb 2006 (PST)
Agree 100%! I came to SessionSaver for the crash recovery, but stayed for the non-crash session saving. It's incredibly useful when having to reboot your OS (e.g. because you installed a new piece of software, or applied OS or third-party software patches), or when having to shut down your laptop because you're on the go, to be able to save your work in Firefox the same way you can in document-oriented software applications, and be able to pick right back up where you left off after you've restarted and logged back in. It would be silly not to implement this and would just mean lots of people would be forcibly killing their own browsers in order to save their sessions.
-- Dan Harkless, 23:17, 16 Feb 2006 (PST)
DOM restore vs. URL restore
What if we serialized and restored the current DOM (including event handlers and such) for each tab, instead of storing the URLs? That would solve all of the problems with reloading of non-idempotent GETs, as well as POST cases, and properly restore the state of apps like gmail. (If we don't do this, then we need to be very careful about restoring form state against a possibly-different form when we restore the session and reload the page. There have been attacks related to changing an input from type=hidden to type=file on reload which I think we would prefer to not revisit.)
- Shaver 09:33, 13 Feb 2006 (PST)
Use-cases for Session Restoration
- Corporate environments: "Most have a policy which states that you have to turn off your computer when you leave for the night. Now assuming that not every employee stays at work in the evening until all work is done, I consider it reasonable for the user to expect to be able to start in the morning right where he has left in the evening, although the machine was switched off over the night."
- "A second scenario is, that, unfortunately, since even FF is not bug free, one has to restart it occasionally when it starts to behave oddly. This is not a crash, it's a user requested quit, but I expect to start work again at exactly the point where I have left."
- consultants/travelers: people who involuntarily shut down the browser many times each day
- admins: people who log onto their user account at many other people's boxes, many times during the day, such as IT/helpdesk workers at large organizations
- mobile: people who load FF, or their profile, off of a usb key.
- Mozilla Testers!: Now that we have auto-updates in testing code, with real Session Restore I can just click 'Restart Now' and always be testing the latest nightly. This is a dream for quality of bug reports. --BillMcGonigle 10:45, 21 Feb 2006 (PST)