06.13.07
Camino Tips: Session Restoration
Session restoration (often called “session saving”) is actually one of the major new features in Camino 1.5, but I’ve seen a bit of confusion over it. The plans for the website include some nice explanations and imagery covering the major new features, but those are not ready yet, so until then, hopefully this post will suffice to clear up any confusion.
Camino 1.5 actually includes two different forms of session restoration. The first one is on all of the time and helps you recover from those nasty crashes you sometimes experience with Camino. 
As you browse, the locations of pages you visit in your windows and tabs are recorded in a file in your Camino profile. If Camino quits unexpectedly, you’ll be prompted when you restart Camino and asked if you want to restore the pages that were open when Camino unexpectedly quit. The code in Camino that saves the current pages is smart enough to not record a page that causes a crash when it loads, so in most cases you can restore the pages from the previous session without worrying about crashing again. Most of the time you’ll have all your pages except the one that caused the crash and can continue browsing where you were before being interrupted.
The second form of session restoration in Camino 1.5 is a more traditional form of “session saving” and can optionally be enabled in the preferences. By checking the box for “When Camino starts: ☑ Load the pages that were open before quitting” in the General preferences, you tell Camino to remember all the pages that were open when you quit Camino manually. When this option is enabled, the next time you open Camino, it will automatically load all the pages that were open when you quit, and you’re ready to continue browsing where you were when that Mac OS X security update installation interrupted you. 
(If the last time Camino quit was an unexpected quit, crash recovery mode takes over and prompts you, as described above.)
What about saving arbitrary sessions (say, a set of pages you use when checking your stocks, or a set of pages you use when working on a certain project)? The most appropriate way to switch between groups of pages related to certain tasks is still to create a tab group for each task and store the tab groups in the Bookmark Bar for easy access. (Even better, the Bookmark Bar is now the default destination when creating new bookmarks, but Camino will remember the last folder or collection you chose and use that as the default the next time. Oops, that’s another tip! 
Two for the price of one.)
With Camino 1.5, quitting and crashes no longer are major impediments to your browsing; session restoration quickly gets you back to browsing where you left off.