Comment by sublinear
3 years ago
Form follows function in the best designs. There are two ideas poorly implemented in all browsers that I wish were fixed.
The first is restoring windows/tabs after a restart. This is not just janky when it refreshes all the pages when you focus a tab, but the browser doesn't even remember what workspace it was in and vomits all windows out onto the current workspace.
The second is bookmarks. If you think about it for a while it seems absurd that there is any apparent difference to the user between their history, bookmarks, and currently open tabs.
Both of these could be solved with some kind of hibernation state for a session. I don't want the pages to reload just because I restarted the machine or browser. I don't want to dig through history to find a window I just had open. I don't want to bookmark pages I frequently visit.
This is especially painful on a work machine since these should be very long sessions that can span a year or more. In the real world you have to restart the browser or machine every other week for updates.
> The first is restoring windows/tabs after a restart. This is not just janky when it refreshes all the pages when you focus a tab, but the browser doesn't even remember what workspace it was in and vomits all windows out onto the current workspace.
This isn't at all my experience anymore. Session restoration in Firefox is pretty much seamless, and for the very rare edge-cases where the native stuff isn't sufficient, Tab Session Manager works for me.
I haven't restarted my machine in months, and it's mostly up to date (last I ran it was couple weeks ago) :). I find it absurd that some OSes still need a restart to apply non-kernel updates.