[Browser] reopens closed sites after manually closing them

[Michael Zanetti]

The feature of the webbrowser to restore opened sites is too aggressive. it also opens sites that have been manually closed instead of just the ones that have been killed by the app lifecycle.

[Mitchell (curious-mitchell)]

Agreed - would be much better to restore pages that have been closed due to a system crash, rather than everything that's been open. This behavior also happens with webapps - which is not the most useful default behavior. At the very least, there should be an option to disable this in the Browser settings, and options for webapp developers to disable this behavior in their apps.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

This behaviour is being backed out in the webapps container, which will start using the StateSaver instead.

For the browser, this is the intended behaviour. Once we have a settings screen in the browser (this is designed but not implemented yet), this is certainly something that can be made optional. In the meantime, if you don’t need tabs, just close them.

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

Olivier, but its like 4 interactions to close a tab... Its not feasible to have that kind of interaction every time just to close the browser window. Also, this bug is not about disabling this behavior completely, its about distinguishing between "the browser has been closed manually" and "the browser has been killed and restored by app lifecycle".

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Added an ubuntu-ux task to get design’s input on the question. Giorgio, what’s your take on the matter?

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Also, note that when bottom-edge gesture will be implemented (see bug #1329943), closing an open tab will be much easier, FWIW.

[Giorgio Venturi (giorgio-venturi-deactivatedaccount)]

I agree with @Olivier, with the bottom edge it will be two gesture to close a tab (Bottom edge + swipe left/right or tap on X). This current design is only provisional.

As per restoring previous session's last tab, it is the default behaviour on mobile Safari, Chrome and Firefox as far as I can remember

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

This is particularly annoying when roaming and a MB of data traffic costs quite some money. It can easily happen that the old news page from last week consumes multiple megabytes of traffic.

[Giorgio Venturi (giorgio-venturi-deactivatedaccount)]

I see your point Michael.

We could add a Browser setting to 'restore last open tab', which could be by default ON

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Giorgio, that’s pretty much what I implemented in the branch linked to this bug (not merged yet). Except that we don’t have a settings UI yet, so for now a user would have to edit ~/.config/webbrowser-app/settings.conf to add "restoreSession = false" (the default value is true).

That way we don’t change the default behaviour, but users who are really annoyed by it have a way to change it.
And we can revisit the default behaviour at any point in the future.

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

I've tested the linked branch and it's better already. It still loads the default page so still generates traffic directly when opening, not really a lot any more though.

My suggestion would be to show a list/grid/whatever that contains screenshots (or favicon + title) of the favorites and/or recent pages. So not loading anything from the network unless the user either taps on one of the favorites/recent images or enters a new url.

Actually, the screen that shows up when you do a "New tab" would be pretty awesome as the start page when opening the browser without restoring the session.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Note that you can prevent the browser from loading any page at all at startup (in combination with the restoreSession option set to false) by adding this line to ~/.config/webbrowser-app/settings.conf:

    homepage = about:blank