Comment 15 for bug 236901

(In reply to comment #4)
> What about a compromise, that session cookies/auth are cleared in this case but
> the list of opened tabs is retained?

The problem is that we currently only react to clearing the History (which is the only one to notify observers). Implementing this would require changes outside of SessionStore.

Let's consider the use case for startup.page=3 + CPD-at-shutdown though: at first view, this doesn't make sense at all - you ask Firefox to purge _all_ History and at the same time it should retain the latest bits of it. Such a user must not only be paranoid but schizophrenic as well. ;-)

There's mainly one legitimate use of that setting constellation I could see here: if you're generally "privacy concerned", but want to keep the option of resuming selected sessions. So you set Firefox to ask you at shutdown and there you either discard the _whole_ session, or you don't discard any of it.

One other exception we might want to make is to not clear the session when the browser is only restarting. However in that case, it would IMO make more sense to not do any clearing at all. If necessary, this exception could quite easily be implemented inside SessionStore itself though (by not purging sessionstore.js when resume_session_once is true).