Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 20 Will Finally Fix Private Browsing Mode
darthcamaro writes "Unlike every other major browser vendor, Mozilla today does not allow users to have their private mode browser window open at the same time as a regular browser window. That's now set to change. This is a flaw that has been in Bugzilla since 2008 and has been the subject of heated discussion for years."
That's one of the very few features that I'd always wanted Firefox to adopt from Chromium, and now it's actually happening - yay for Firefox 20. Can't be longer than a few weeks any more anyway; now can it? ;p
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
I would totally mess that up. Open porn in the wrong tab and forget to clear cache because I'm used to not having to do so.
It doesn't help that I have 50 tabs open at one time, usually in the same window.
I just tried this in Safari, and the private browsing mode seems to be all or nothing.
So this feature will show up by Wednesday?
Private mode tabs should have a different theme or color for the browser portion above the web page so that it's obvious that it's different. There's no need to force them into a different window.
Finally, a decent porn mode. Why it took that long.
I'm waiting for incognito mode not only not to leave track on the computer itself but also on the remote sites I visit. How is it incognito if I connect somewhere I've been before to and you send the cookies that were already saved for that site, for example?
:-)
So basically, fix the thing
You realize you can configure it to do just that, right?
Never worried much about it really... Didn't think it was an issue. After private lemonbrowzing, I would just Ctrl-Shift-P back to my, worksafeish shenanigans.
That's how it works in opera: anonymous tabs not windows (but you can put the tab in a separate window if you want to).
As a web developper, I often use this to have several sessions with different users on the same website.
I'm kind of wondering when they'll add HSTS security, which ensures all traffic that starts on HTTPS does not get redirected to insecure HTTP instead.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Chrome is version 23, so Firefix is still lame, and lord help IE stuck at version 10.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Why would anyone, ever, browse the web in "public" mode??? Isn't that like saying "Yes, please track me"?
First thing I do on Firefox is set it to dump all cookies/cache/history/etc/etc every time it closes. 100% on all the time private mode would be just fine, thanks. Unless you *like* big brother watching you.
This is how Opera has done it from the beginning... I'm really surprised the others haven't at least made it a non-default option yet
post politically correct things (Linux rules and Bush sucks!) to Slashdot while logged in, and at the same time open a Private Browsing window and troll as AC?
Erm, if the browser is sending a cookie, that means the cookie was saved in your incognito session, so the thing is broken in the first place. It shouldn't save cookies at all.
Firefox has supported multiple simultaneous sessions since at least the 3.x days.
Use these command-line options:
-ProfileManager -new-instance
Then create as many different profiles as you want. They will all have their own history, bookmarks, add-ons, cookies, etc. The only place you have to worry about cross-profile pollution is with plugins like flash that keep state (like flash-cookies) in their own directory rather than under the firefox profile directory.
I have about 8 different profiles - one for gmail, one for my bank, one for slashdot, one for IMDB, etc and I keep a special "anonymous" profile that is basically a private-mode session, it wipes everything on exit, cookies, disk cache, history, etc. I even use the "User Agent Switcher" add-on so that each profile pretends to be a slightly different version of Firefox to make browser fingerprinting a little bit harder.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Paranoid people should take the time to look at the options. They're there for a reason. Options that nobody care about may not be in the options menu but they'll be in about:config.
Reminds me how I've wished for a new http "undo" feature.
Basically, if I make a request of a page from a server and decide it was a mistake, I want to invoke "undo" and have my browser history go back, wipe any cookies or history or cache trace, plus delete anything downloaded... AND THEN ALSO send an "undo" header to Apache to request wiping my visit from the logs.
Of course that would be open to abuse. So servers should only honor such "undo" requests if they happen within X seconds (say, 120) after the last non-ajax bit was sent to the browser, and as long as no further requests are made by the browser after the first one. For example, click a link on the page, interact with a form widget, or invoke a new ajax request... and you'd totally kill the ability to "undo".
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
ok, at least you're honest about it, but holy shit, really, 50 tabs? you really need that much porn open at once.....you must be like a rabid sex monkey 23 hours a day....
For firefox this is actually pretty good. My personal favorite bug is still plaguing users of FF over 11 years after being reported.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
are you really THAT paranoid about ... well, i dunno, something?
oh wait, this is slashdot, so, yes.
I'm still waiting for the window drag handle to be the entire "glass" area at the top, and not just the top X% of it. Ever since Windows Vista/7, Microsoft has made it a defacto standard that any part of a window that is "glass" is a drag handle, and Chrome does this nicely. It is very annoying to not have a visual indicator of where the drag handle starts/stops, and more annoying to have that empty glass space become more or less "useless" if the browser isn't full of a million tabs.
So, Firefox is already set to get out of its teens. What's next? Firefox 30 late 2013? Version 100 by 2016?
Pretty soon they're going to have to do something, because people are going to get fucking sick of counting up an entire version pointlessly every god damn month.
Well some of us do more with a computer than check up on the latest kardashian kraze and failbook. While we have browser preferences, we tend to choose the one that has the plugins we need, even if it is technically inferior software.
Memory leaks have been a problem with Firefox since back around version 2.0. Already at version 17, clearly Mozilla Corporation is more interested in inflating the version number than actually fixing decade-old performance problems. Ironically, such high version numbers with the same old problems make them look even worse than they did with a sane versioning system... apparently that never crossed anyone's mind at Mozilla.
To be fair, Chrome is at version 23 now. I'd say no one thinks of that browser as the "grandfather".
Really, people put way too much stock in version numbers, especially for projects with rapid release cycles.
Actually, as a web guy, I also care about logs that are free from false positives due to accidental clicks and redirects. A feature like this would help me verify that traffic to a page on the site is purposeful and desired by the end user.
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
For a Chrome-addict like me, what I've been waiting for is the option to open an incognito tab within the same window as regular tabs. Apparently this lack of functionality is a feature intended to ease confusion among users. For me, I just find it irritating.
No, its to prevent leakage of data via the container. Each tab is supposedly running in a sandbox, but if they are in the same container window there is a risk there.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Dude, at that level of paranoia, go ahead and install Tor ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)) and use the version of Firefox it comes with to route your requests through the onion router.
I'm waiting for incognito mode not only not to leave track on the computer itself but also on the remote sites I visit. How is it incognito if I connect somewhere I've been before to and you send the cookies that were already saved for that site, for example?
According to the help page about Incognito mode,
it explicitly states it deletes all cookies when you exit incognito mode. Use it for single purpose at a time, and close it out after the fact, there will be no cookies left for them to find.
Never log into any account while in incognito mode, unless you ONLY log in there while in incognito mode.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I wish some day, the very word any browser uses to market themselves, that word being "fast"... actually meant something.
The difference is, Winamp's version numbering actually made sense. There was Winamp 2, and then the flop that brought with it freeform skinning known as Winamp 3. Because Winamp 3 was a failure (I don't know why, I liked it...), Nullsoft decided to go back to the drawing board. They decided to extend the current Winamp at the time (version 2) with plug-ins to handle freeform skinning and various other features they planned in the rewrite (version 3). The result of combining (version) two and (version) three was... drumroll... 5. 2+3=5.
But that happened many years ago; Winamp has been at version 5.xxx ever since. The main problem I see with Winamp was not exactly its version numbering system (although it can be confusing at times with so many digits after a single decimal, though that is not a problem with the current 5.63), but the fact that AOL has for years been adding a whole shitload of garbage to the installer, and it's installed by default, with no sane "full, but without the useless options" setting. And that's not including the endless unchecks to get rid of unwanted sponsored garbage. There's literally so much useless junk installed in a "full" installation, it's actually very difficult to get a nice, light, clean install without loads of crap that you don't need.
I miss the days of being able to select a "full" installation, uncheck maybe 6-12 things, install and be done with it. Now... half the new garbage, I don't even know what it is... and after running Linux for so long (ie. no Winamp, unfortunately), it's even worse trying to figure out what's what. What it needs is more options than just light/minimal and full... all or nothing is just not a good compromise.
Not a very bright web guy? Just look at how long they are on your page, less than X minutes and you just wipe their session again (or reverse it and just mark sessions that are actually busy enough to count as "interested").
(and don't wipe the data, amount of people who aren't interested in your site is probably as important as how many are)
Just watch where you click. Touchpads with mouse clicks enabled anyone? Touch screens?
Am I the only one finding it is easier to click somewhere you don't intend to of make other input mistakes when using one of these compared to a conventional 3 button mouse with a scroll wheel?
Am I just too old school? Seems to me like doing flawless input with these is an ability challenge in itself.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Yes, but the summary mentioned major browsers
What's the only browser that comes on the major tablet? The iPad is not just a plurality but a majority.
KeePass
Requires .NET Framework 2.0. Or does it work in Mono? What password managers have Linux users found useful?
it's easy enough to collect those data together and make a profile for that IP address and for the various sites hit at the various times of day.
And with the depletion of IPv4 addresses, you eventually end up trying to distinguish among 200 unique visitors behind one carrier-grade NAT.
The result of combining (version) two and (version) three was... drumroll... 5. 2+3=5.
"nobody wants to see a Winamp 4 skin" is more amusing. :)
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Easy enough to change - modify the tab colors so it's VERY obvious the tab is in incognito mode.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I once had 4 instances of mplayer running at one time.
It was.... interesting...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Why does that matter? It's all under the same process.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Reminds me how I've wished for a new http "undo" feature.
Basically, if I make a request of a page from a server and decide it was a mistake, I want to invoke "undo" and have my browser history go back, wipe any cookies or history or cache trace, plus delete anything downloaded... AND THEN ALSO send an "undo" header to Apache to request wiping my visit from the logs.
Of course that would be open to abuse. So servers should only honor such "undo" requests if they happen within X seconds (say, 120) after the last non-ajax bit was sent to the browser, and as long as no further requests are made by the browser after the first one. For example, click a link on the page, interact with a form widget, or invoke a new ajax request... and you'd totally kill the ability to "undo".
That would just make things unnecessarily complicated.
Why are you doing that? Don't leave the browser open when you're not using it. Don't leave a page open when you're not using it. Problem solved.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
There is a feature that I very much like in Firefox: if you have ordinary horizontal tab bar and you open a lot of tabs, it makes the tab strip scrollable, instead of squeezing the tabs smaller and smaller. With all other browsers you just end up with tiny tabs which text you can't read, which is horrible.
VLC long ago replaced Winamp for me. Does everything I want.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Checked your task list. Chrome spawns a sandboxed task per tab.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
So... which browser has this "bug" fixed? Because none of them I've found work as intended.
Maybe that will give them time to finally build and support a 64 bit version. :)
32 Bit should be the exception nowadays, but apparently they decided to drop (!) any further 64 bit effort...
Yeah, i also still play 8 bit Commodore 64 games on my computer, perfectly normal
If somebody understands that 64 bit killoff please explain to me...
What has been seen cannot be unseen.
I really like MicroSofts decision to make do-not-track default in IE10. The same should be set for other web sites and people should get a large popup for each site that requires them to allow tracking (yes, per site base exceptions).
Also, It should be easy to configure Tor or other proxies for do-not-track sessions, or even per domain/site that's being visited. Storing IP addresses will often make tracking still feasible and often rather simple. FaceBook keeps "ghost profiles" for people based solely on cookies and IP addresses, I'm fairly certain Google does the same.
If i was in the USA I'd have the constitutional right to be left alone and a lot of companies are not honouring that right. At least give me the tools to make it hard for them to violate my privacy without making it a technical nightmare to do so if I still want to use the Internet.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
ok, at least you're honest about it...
Honest, but Anonymous Coward... Does that really count?
Actually, as a web guy, I also care about logs that are free from false positives due to accidental clicks and redirects.
As a web guy that is security aware I would not want that a hacker uses this "feature" to hide his tracks after his forfeit.
Give private tabs a fat, colorful border. Or make them negative even (white text on black bg). Surely there are a million ways to make this obvious.
Nope. Can't do without a mouse. I guess a tablet (WACOM etc.) might be sweet too, but none of that other crap for me. It's just crap... I'm not even a gamer, but I have a somewhat gamer mouse; and that precision and speed is just something I would not want to miss. Flawless is a good word to describe it :)
When browsing in private mode, if you then switch back to normal, when you close Firefox and as the tabs shut down, you usually get one of the supposedly private pages flash up briefly. Clearly not all buffers are cleared when exiting privacy mode.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
who uses the firefox button? Everyone i know just re-enables the menubar.
Firefox on android syncs with my desktop well enough. (android 4.0 on the phone and debian on the desktop.)
Work bio at MMWD
Saying this is 'broken' (by saying it is 'fixed' now) because it doesn't let you mix windows is a total crap article title.
Slashdot is getting as bad as information week with the sensationalist crap titles
I know this will shock many slashdot users... but people do use the web for things other than porn (and slashdot).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
VLC has been to unstable for me and in general just doesn't tend to work as it's supposed to. In fact, my experience with it has been so consistently bad, I honestly don't get why it's so damn popular.
That's how it works in opera: anonymous tabs not windows (but you can put the tab in a separate window if you want to).
As a web developper, I often use this to have several sessions with different users on the same website.
Yep..!
You can also close all private tabs without effecting your non-private ones with [Ctrl] + [Shfit] + [Q].
You can even assign any of the actions related to private browsing to a mouse gesture or keyboard shortcut in Opera -> Settings -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts.
The arch foe.
After upgrading to FF17, the browser started crashing whenever the file dialog pops up for up- or downloads. It doesn't matter whether the file is double-clicked or selected via "Ok" -- the browser instantly crashes afterwards, sending home a crash report.
That very behavior also takes place with FF18. When running the with strace, the crash does not happen. FF16, in term, does not show this bug.
Any idea how to hunt this down or even fix it? (I'm running Ubuntu 10.04LTS w/ Trinity/KDE3.5)
Strange, as I have had zero issues and the number of crashes I could count with my fingers. I've been using it for years.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
#!/bin/bash /usr/bin/firefox -P new -no-remote -private
exec
Bug fixed :)
I've switched away from Chrome since Chrome started adding my incognito cookie and javascript exceptions to the persistent list. Everything else Chrome did to tick me off was tolerable, but the leaking of incognito exceptions... GTFO
Question for religious people: where do unrepentant masochists go when they die?
But since my #1 required feature is "not randomly crashing out, sometimes ten seconds after startup", I'm now writing this via Chrome. Too bad you couldn't stick to your original vision: small, fast, stable.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I belive winamp 3 was a failure because it used up too many resources in comparison to winamp 2. At the time, winamp 2 was extremely lightweight - and that's what made it so popular.
Possibly, I'm not really sure, but I actually thought it had something to do with the fact that WA3 was such a major departure (IIRC it was a brand new program, it didn't even support classic Winamp skins).