Preserve Window Spaces Placement Between Restarts

I use Spaces to organize the task I'm pursing. In that vein, I often will have a browser window on each Space, with open tabs relevant to that task that Space is used for.

For example, Space 1 is for Work. So in addition to work applications, I have a browser window open with tabs relevant to work. Space 2 is for Photography. And Space 3 is for just general browsing and social networking, etc.

I am easily able to put a different browser window into each space. The problem is that when I restart the computer, all windows appear in the first Space!

My browser is Chrome, and perhaps this is an issue I need to take up with the Chrome team. Or is this a bug in OS X Lion?

Solution 1:

I encountered this posting while searching for a way to do exactly what OP wanted to do.

Interestingly, Finder seems to do it right -- when you have multiple Finder windows in various Spaces, and restart your Mac (or if you just "killall Finder" at Terminal, which restarts Finder), they go into the Spaces where they were.

Also, Safari often does that too. Safari seems to preserve the Space each window was opened at, if you restart your Mac with all the browsers open. But Safari fails to remember Spaces if you simply quit and restart the app itself.

So I guess it's not true that it is impossible to achieve this, but there seem to be some issues within the Mac system that do not allow this all the time for all apps. But I'm hopeful that someone could find out a tweak.

Solution 2:

Organizing program windows by space by pre-defined setting is unfortunately not possible. By that I mean there is no way to "lock" particular windows into their space that endures through a reboot. As you mentioned, you can assign particular programs to spaces, but not particular program windows. And, as you also noted, they apparently don't re-start the windows in their previous spaces.