When a refresh is performed on the page all chat sessions are lost.

[ashward]

As title - a refresh of the chat page losses all previous chat sessions, and therefore history. An improvement will be to make the client resilient to a page refresh.

[ashward]

This is not straightforward. As the entire application runs within the web browser doing a page refresh is akin to closing and reloading a normal desktop application.

The client would need to keep a track of the state of the currently open chat tabs, perhaps in a session cookie on the browser.

We also have the problem that when the chat page is unloaded (which happens when closing the browser, or refreshing the browser or navigating away) then the client necessarily sends an "offline" presence which then removes the user from any group chats which they may be a part of. I'm not sure whether it's then possible for the user to re-join the group chats without being re-invited.