Currently, "Browsing and download history" always includes session history. In fact, if you clear history manually, it also clears session history, but then once you resume browsing for a little bit, Firefox starts recording it again, so that may be why you didn't notice that clearing manually also wipes out your tab data.

I posted a new Idea for this on Mozilla Connect. It is awaiting moderation, but assuming I didn't break any rules, it should eventually appear at this link:

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/make-clear-history-and-restore-tabs-work-together/idi-p/16016

I cleared my browsing history manually via the three lines in the top right corner -> History -> clear history (or whatever it's called in English) -> "all history" and first box checked which clears browsing history yesterday and made sure nothing was visible in the history list and nothing was "recorded" before closing Firefox and today all my tabs are still there. So that works the way I want to, but it's when I use the setting under privacy settings to automatically clear history when I close the browser where it goes to the extreme and also closes all tabs.

I'll post a pic to show the setting I mean just in case there's any confusion

Edit: Sorry for downvoting you, I tried to figure out how to properly answer your response just in case you won't see this

That is interesting. I found a bug on file (1753947) about Clear Recent History:

• When you use Clear Recent History to remove Browsing & Download History, the current session history file (recovery.jsonlz4) is NOT deleted, but all the other session history files ARE deleted (recovery.baklz4, previous.jsonlz4, and files created during upgrades).
• If you immediately repeat the action, then the current session history file IS deleted. Please don't test that if you want to keep your tabs.

Either way, the shutdown behavior is a separate situation.

So the answer to my original question is basically that I can't make it stop closing all my tabs unless the suggestion you posted on Mozilla Connect gets approved?

As far as I know, there is no option/exception.

If you need to keep clearing history at shutdown, you could consider using an add-on to keep/restore tabs. Note that add-ons will store the current URL and won't keep all the back/forward history of those tabs.

You'll want one that saves tabs automatically and doesn't require you to remember to save them before quitting. These are the ones I found a couple years ago, and there might be new ones by now:

Use database storage:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tab-session-manager/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/session-boss/

Use bookmark storage:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/session-sync/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/my-sessions/

Bookmark storage is more robust in that Firefox backs it up regularly. However, having the extra data show up when you are searching your bookmarks may be annoying.

Ok, thank you for the help :)