Last week bug 354894 landed to, surprisingly, little fanfare. It’s a big deal though (more so on Windows & Linux).

Ever since Firefox introduced Session Restore, there has been one particularly annoying problem: if you close your last browser window but accidentally left a non-browser window open (eg. Downloads), then your session was fucked. End of story.

Well, no longer. Nils Maier (co-author of DownThemAll) finally got fed up with this problem & decided to do something about it. This is the first “major” piece of code he’s contributed, so a round of applause.

A super quick summary of the changes (assuming you have enabled session restore):

• If you leave a non-browser window open, just close it. Your session will be saved (assuming you aren’t on OS X anyway).
• If you’ve gotten down to that last non-browser window & realized your mistake, opening Firefox again (e.g. from the start menu) reopens your last closed window.

As a tangential comment, it’s things like this that really make me proud to be a part of the Mozilla community. So much of our browser & platform comes from people like Nils who give their time freely to help make the web a better place.

Update: Minor changes based on email with Nils.