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Firefox 20 Arrives With Per-Window Private Browsing, New Download Manager
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 20 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The improvements include per-window private browsing, a new download manager in the Firefox toolbar, and the ability to close hanging plugins without the browser hanging. The new desktop version was available as of yesterday on the organization's FTP servers, but that was just the initial release of the installers. Firefox 20 has now officially been made available over on Firefox.com and all users of old Firefox versions should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on the official Google Play Store. The changelogs are here: desktop and Android."
Chrome had it for 5 years now...
Nice troll, but as Chrome didn't exist 5 years ago, somewhat implausible.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/firefox-23.0a1.en-US.win32.installer.exe
Chrome did not initially have incognito, that came later.
Firefox has had private browsing longer than Chrome has had it. The difference was that you could have a normal and incognito Chrome window open at the same time, Firefox was all or nothing.
Chrome was playing catch up a long time ago. It's a game of leap frog. Chrome is now in the back seat.
I just checked that and you are right. The download manager showed things I thought were deleted.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
I've found that by going into about:config and changing browser.download.useToolkitUI to true will restore the original download manager. There is one bug I've noticed by using the old download manager is that the title of its window will clear out leaving it a titleless window after all downloads are completed. Closing and reopening the downloads window will cause the title to be restored. A warning though that this key might fail to work in the next release or so. Just like the status bar fiasco.
You'll also need to customize the toolbar in order to remove the new downloads icon though. Also the "new" download manager is still accessible via History menu &> Show All History after making the above configuration change.
This space is not for rent.
Nope. Just tested this, and the second private browsing window automatically picked up the login session from the first private browsing window.
Which is OK until you hit Ctrl+Shift+T or open History->Recently Closed Tabs, which apparently keep these things around even if you've explicitly deleted them from your history.
I just opened a second window for the first time since upgrading to Firefox 20 a few minutes ago, and it even tried to reopen a page I was working on earlier today, which I clearly haven't visited for several hours because it's an admin UI hosted on a device that's powered off right now. I have absolutely no idea why it chose that page to open, and not any of the dozens I must have visited since. In fact, I have no idea why it tried to reopen any old pages at all, though I had restarted Firefox a couple of minutes earlier after updating various extensions so perhaps that was something to do with it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It looks like they've broken Private Browsing as far as extensions are concerned as well.
I use Lazarus to avoid losing form data if things crash, and it used to automatically disable itself in Private Browsing mode. I've just confirmed that since updating to Firefox 20 this doesn't happen any more, even though the relevant Lazarus option is still set the same way.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Unlike Chrome and Internet Explorer on Vista/7/8, Firefox doesn't run a child process in a sandbox to better protect the browser against exploits. Firefox runs entirely as a normal user process, and thus can access anything that regular processes can. An exploit running as an ordinary user can steal your bank account passwords and act as a zombie almost as effectively as an exploit running with root access.
I stay with Firefox only because I dislike tabs. Unlike Chrome, Firefox still has an option to open links in new windows instead of tabs.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
You can disable that by going to about:config and setting browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false.
There's always been a separate stop button, you just have to customize the toolbar so that the stop button is ordered before the reload button, otherwise it "combines" them into a single reload/stop button. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2142587
Basically you right click the toolbar, select customize, then drag the stop button to the left of the reload button, and viola... separate buttons (yes it's retarded).