on the plus side as a side-effect, we just realized something important
firefox does try to save and restore what virtual desktop a window is on. it's just that our window manager makes empty virtual desktops go away (they come back as soon as they're addressed by name or number), and firefox can't restore into a desktop that it thinks doesn't exist.
we do enjoy the ritual of tracing over every browser window every time we reboot and remembering where we put it, we probably wouldn't be nearly as good at closing things we no longer care about without that
but it's still kinda tedious. mm mm. the paradox of automation
update: that did work
that wasn't even what we were trying to work on, but this changes everything
@ireneista I care very much about the position of my Firefox windows, so ages ago (on X¹) I wrote something extract their position from my window manager, save it, and then restore everything on demand.
¹ I don't know if you can do this on Wayland, or through extracting information from Firefox itself. My hack covers both the normal window position and the iconified position, because I care about both and my window manager has actual iconification to the root window.
@ireneista Yeah, I manually trigger my 'fix the positions' stuff after Firefox has started, and sometimes things go off because eg some web page has failed to reload.
(And sometimes there are duplicate window titles due to aggregator sites.)
@ireneista agreed - I also try to stick avoid shoving literally everything into browser
it’s frustrating how much developer mindshare (ito new software, experiments, etc) is captured by browser-and-webapp
(Electron, react, etc all have a very non-zero hand in this guilt, and fb et al are responsible but likely never to be held accountable:|)
@froztbyte yeah absolutely
we've got some analysis of how it wound up that way - basically nobody ever did find a way to make coding with "real" widget sets faster or easier, and targeting the web is cheaper because it's supposedly the same for everyone so you don't need multiple versions
but that's far less important than figuring out how to change that dynamic
@ireneista it helps that when I was doing this it was in a different distro than my daily driver machine instance of the browser where my all my open tabs live :P
with that said it's handy that in linux you can use a separate build of ff in any of the containerized solutions or in a whole separate distro you use in a chroot, vm, etc.
Irenes (many)
Chris Siebenmann
JP
a kilo of saucepans (rakslice)