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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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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
Not everyone is that paranoid. Some people like the convenience of saving cookies and cache across sessions.
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.
Maybe if you upgrade from Firefox 3.6 you'll find out about the new features they added?
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.
Definately not what most people want -- I certainly would hate that, too.
If you want it though, it's easy enough to enable: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/private-browsing-browse-web-without-saving-info#w_how-do-i-always-start-firefox-in-private-browsing
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.
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.
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.
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
Yes, but the summary mentioned major browsers
*ducks*
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
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.
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.
Just use month/years in your release numbers. Seriously. A version of Firefox released in december 2012 is firefox 12.12. Simple. Gives you a clear idea of its modernity. No confusion or consternation.
If anyone else needs simple solutions, I'll be over here sitting in the Idea Booth.
That's because there are none. Seriously, start taking your schizophrenia meds, because no-one is out to get you. No-one cares what websites you visit. It will not affect your life in any meaningful way.
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...
re you eventually end up trying to distinguish among 200 unique visitors behind one carrier-grade NAT. But that's where the browser fingerprinting as described at https://panopticlick.eff.org/ comes in: even if you have javascript disabled, your browser sends along information about your:
.
.
-- media types accepted
-- cookies enabled
-- HTTP-accept headers
-- and of course, your user-agent
Even behind noscript, my browsing leaks 17.96 bits of information, according to the EFF panopticlick survey for me. If we allow javascript, then this other information can also be gathered:
-- fonts available
-- addons available
-- browser plug-in details
-- pixel dimensions of display
-- color depth of display
-- time zone
Allowing javascript leaks 21.18 bits of identifying information. In fact, just the browser-plug in details alone seem to be enough to allow my visit to eff to be recognized as unique from all other browsers that have gone there before. Of course, if you use a combiation like "IE version X" running on "MSWindows $ident", then you're more lkely to be a bit more anonymous than someone running a debian system with a lot of non-common browser plug-ins on Firefox-cutting-edge-version.
The issue is not so much that 64-bit is dropped or deemed unimportant; the issue is that Mozilla as a corporation has limited resources to devote to 64-bit Windows builds.
Basically, the main blockers are:
- Plugins. 64-bit plugins on Windows are still not 100% and there currently isn't a way of loading 32-bit plugins in a 64-bit Firefox. Yes, ideally Firefox would have this, but again - resources.
- Testing. It'd add another column onto the test matrix which is a non-negligible cost overhead to the release engineering guys (who are already massively overworked as it is). For a feature that Mozilla as a corporation isn't prioritising, this burden on releng is unacceptable.
- Benefits. The benefits from switching to 64-bit code aren't actually as plentiful as you might think. Basically, the major one is that Firefox would be able to address more memory instead of limiting at 4GB. However, project memshrink (https://areweslimyet.com/) has been working pretty hard on reducing the memory footprint of Firefox, which is the correct fix in this case *except* in the case of those people who are using hundreds of tabs amongst several browser windows. Unfortunately, they're in a small enough niche that, again, Mozilla can't dedicate resources towards a black hole to accommodate them (yet).
The myths that building the browser in 64-bit results in somehow faster code, or more efficient execution are just that - myths. In fact, in a lot of cases, code that was written for x86 that's been recompiled in x86_64 results in slower code because your pointer sizes are twice as big and you start smashing through your CPU cache more quickly.
For a more detailed description on the cost supporting these has incurred, Ben Hearsum wrote a very good post on dev-platform: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.platform/UOn1iQetA5w/-DNzeCOMdrcJ
TL;DR - it's not a question of whether Mozilla wants to do this (they do); it's a question of whether the resource/benefit tradeoff makes sense at this time.
I would also like to remind people that software engineers aren't just assets that can be moved arbitrarily from project to project, so all those people saying "stop working on X feature and concentrate on 64-bit instead" - stop thinking like that. That's how bad managers are made.
George Wright