Firefox window placement in workspaces

Desktop Environments Gnome
1

Hello,

I am running latest GNOME (42.x) and I have an issue with Firefox. In latest GNOME there is a “dynamic workspaces” feature that I have turned off as follows:

image

My problem is that I want Firefox to restore the original position of windows when starting (I have open previous windows and tabs selected), but that is extremely unreliable.

Right now I have 6 windows open:

  • two of them (L1/L2) are Linux-related and are in workspace 1
  • two of them (D1/D2/D3) are Development-related and are in workspace 2
  • one of them (S1) is science-related and is in workspace 3

When I exit Firefox and restart it, all windows go back to their respective workspace except for D3 which appears in workspace 1 instead of 2.

Furthermore, if I open a new window (N1) and visit any site, then it exit/restart always makes it reappear in workspace 1.

This is very annoying. I have no idea how L1/L2/D1/D2/S1 have “stuck” to their original workspaces, but anything new I open seems to ignore the workspace it was placed in and insists on reappearing in workspace 1.

Does anyone know what affects this and how I could fix it?

2

one of these may help
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4736/smart-auto-move/
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4709/another-window-session-manager/

1 Like
3

Thank you @CommanderKeen, I’ve installed “Smart auto move” and it seems to place windows where they should be when I exit/restart Firefox.

So, just curious now: is this then a GNOME issue? I am just wondering whether:

  1. Is it Firefox code that is aware of desktop workspaces and tries to restore original state at startup? Therefore Firefox code is not detecting properly the GNOME workspaces and fails to behave correcty, OR:

  2. It’s something Firefox does not care about: it simply recreates its windows with their tabs and puts them all in one place, leaving it to the desktop (in this case GNOME) to restore each window’s original location?

I was sort of assuming it is (1), but now that a GNOME extension has fixed this for me, I am not so sure…

4

43 Extensions now? :rofl:

1 Like
5

…and now:

1 Like
6

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