Re: [Usability] Cross-Session vs. Temporary States

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On May 11, 2007, at 10:19 AM, Jacob Beauregard wrote:
> ...
> For instance, when I open Opera, it's always on the last web page I 
> visited. It wouldn't be clear to me that Opera would save the webpage 
> I visited. However, this is typically not obtrusive, as I am usually 
> not worried about my homepage. It can be a problem with recovery, 
> however, as the page I was on may have caused the browser to crash.

Have you compared Epiphany's behavior in these situations? When you log 
in, it will open the same pages that were open when you logged out. And 
if Epiphany crashes, relaunching it will restore the URL of each page 
but not actually load it, in case it was the page that caused the 
crash. The only things missing are to preserve the *state* of open 
pages (which would be extremely difficult, e.g. saving the state of 
currently-running scripts), and for Epiphany to relaunch itself 
automatically following a crash like Nautilus does. If the latter was 
implemented, then I wouldn't need to launch a "Web browser" ever again. 
I could just open URLs and perform searches from Deskbar, and that they 
were opening in Epiphany would be an implementation detail.

> In another context, when I'm using KDE, I find it frustrating that 
> Konqueror will not be in the same viewing state for file browsing. 
> Yes, I know this is the GNOME list, but I'd still hope to spark some 
> discussion on this topic.
> ...

I regard it as a bug whenever logging in does not return an application 
to exactly the state it was in when I logged out (or as near as 
possible, given changes that have happened on the Internet or network). 
On real desks, that preservation of state happens by default. It's an 
unfortunate characteristic of computers that doing it in software 
requires lots of implementation.

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/