Saving and restoring application state

[Casey Jao <casey jao gmail com>]

Some time ago Gnome had some option to automatically save and restore the state of the user's desktop session, but that option seems to have been removed. Are there any plans to bring back that feature?

That ability is arguably even more important now than before since Gnome software has started asking the user to reboot for all software updates. If users are asked to interrupt their workflow and quit everything they have open in order to update their browser, they may simply choose to postpone software updates. This is obviously not optimal from a security point of view. But the average user isn't likely to appreciate this; putting off updates in order to avoid rebooting became so ingrained in the Windows culture that that Windows started forcing reboots (even at the cost of data loss) to make users apply security patches. A robust session restore capability that lets users easily resume where they left off would help reduce the cost of keeping up with security updates. 

It seems that several other desktop environments have some ability to restore all windows at the next login. KDE and Xfce for example can both do this, at least for applications written in the native graphical frameworks. Similarly OS X added some time ago a systemwide API for applications to save and restore their state. Are there any similar plans in the works for Gnome/GTK?