GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 673453
epiphany restores session on every startup
Last modified: 2012-04-12 15:36:53 UTC
Epiphany built from git master restores my session (all previously open windows) every time it starts up. This is a change from 3.4, and was presumably caused by http://git.gnome.org/browse/epiphany/commit/?id=87131a9bef82b5ec84bcd4bd3bf9471d6325f7cd I'm not sure whether this new behavior (restoring on every start) is a bug or was intentional. The comment in the change above seems to imply that the intention was to autorestore the session only after a crash. If that's so, this new behavior is a bug and should be fixed. On the other hand, the comment at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666601#c1 seems to imply that the intention is to always restore the session on startup. If so, I would strongly prefer that we not do this, because - It makes Epiphany start more slowly. - The site I was on the last time I ran Epiphany is usually not where I want to go now. - It's potentially a privacy concern: if I run Epiphany when someone else is sitting beside me, I may not want them to see the last site I visited. - The behavior is especially annoying when I open Epiphany by clicking a link in another program such as a mail client, since then a couple of windows open (the destination I clicked plus the old session window), which is distracting. So if the goal here was to restore on every startup, please add a preference which the user can use to get the old behavior, i.e. a blank window on startup every time.
This is indeed intentional, see http://git.gnome.org/browse/epiphany/commit/?id=f1c478dc347b8e59dab6e4d23095b44c33515be7 and http://git.gnome.org/browse/epiphany/commit/?id=381ce4af310607cc84ac1e84abbecda2d7d3e7d9 I think a preference here probably makes sense, at the very least I was planning to add a dconf key for this. Not sure whether it will show up in the UI, but I think we probably want to do that too. > - The behavior is especially annoying when I open Epiphany by clicking a link in another program such as a mail client, since then a couple of windows open (the destination I clicked plus the old session window), which is distracting. I'll have to think if this is a bug or not :D It is annoying, but otoh losing the session state would be bad. Perhaps we should recover the infobar asking whether we want the session restored in this case. Of course if we add a setting and the user chooses not to restore the session this would simply not happen at all.
OK, thanks for letting me know. Glad to hear there will be a dconf setting at least. I think this should also be a setting in the preferences dialog.
Created attachment 211920 [details] [review] session-restore.diff
> For 3), the process will die with the state saved up to that point, > there's nothing we can do. For that reason, on startup also check the > new setting; if it's set to 'never' ignore the session state, open a > window in the homepage, and delete the old state file. Shouldn't (3), when set to 'never', ask the user whether he wants to restore the session, considering that there was a crash and most likely the user would like to get back to what they were doing?
(In reply to comment #4) > Shouldn't (3), when set to 'never', ask the user whether he wants to restore > the session, considering that there was a crash and most likely the user would > like to get back to what they were doing? Well, never is never ;) My idea is to add a new option, 'crashed', that does what Epiphany used to do before.
I've pushed this to master, plus another commit with the 'crashed' option. Closing.
Great to have this setting. Thanks!