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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.
It sounds a bit different since Chrome supports one private browsing cookie store, and one general cookie store. If you have two private browsing chrome windows (or tabs) they both use the same private browsing cookie store.
Firefox now sounds like it supports multiple private browsing cookie stores, so you could login to the same site 3 or 4 or however many times with different private windows, whereas with chrome you can only login twice at the same time.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/firefox-23.0a1.en-US.win32.installer.exe
Firefox is going exponential. Can't wait for the next version, Firefox v2^5
v21 will have auto-sausage-fapping capability - it'll even wipe up after you
seriously ?, the new download "manager" is nothing of the sort, it manages nothing, as soon as i click the downloads button it opens the entire library (and the cpu sucking waiting time for it to open), which is asking to show me ALL my history, bookmarks AND downloads in a whole another window, not a little onobtrusive window like before, and no that terrible chromeless!!? overlay doesn't count, good job iam not disabled egh ? what a total waste of time
as for information, it wastes space like nothing else, 200px tall rows for 1 line of 12px text ? (the name of the downloaded file whoo), no extra info or details about the download at all other than apparently its on my hard drive, no exact link, speed, time completed, size, referer, server details etc etc
absolute garbage, an embarrasment to mention it other than WTF have you done ?, and iam looking for a replacement addon as we speak HALP
Well, that's freaky.
I routinely delete things like download history when I've no further need for the files, partly as a tidiness thing and partly as a privacy thing. (This is a work machine that I use for my consulting/contracting gigs, including screen sharing for presentations/teleconferencing from time to time, so both tidiness and discretion are often called for.)
Suddenly, when I go to Tools->Downloads, there's a whole list of everything I downloaded since forever, not least a few potentially sensitive financial records and a whole trail of breadcrumbs identifying clients and various commercial research I've been doing on their behalf. The files are long gone, of course, but it's a good thing that lot didn't show up in the middle of a screen-sharing session with a different client.
What's more disturbing is that despite being reasonably careful about these things, or so I thought, Firefox has apparently been keeping a detailed record of these downloads even though I'd been clearing the old Downloads dialog regularly. What else is it storing away somewhere that I don't know about?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I say "No!" to such mathematical pretentiousness. Personally, I will not be upgrading until they give their version numbers in binary to prove they still employ actual programmers. Besides, everyone knows that you should never use anything below version 50 of any software because that's when all the bugs have been worked out.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
I don't understand why they don't natively incorporate download managers like DownThemAll into Firefox. Segmented transfers, speed limiting, link catchers...
I don't understand why Mozilla never just worked with the author of Download Statusbar to integrate it. That extension has been one of the most popular addons since it was released in 2004. In fact, the addons site show it is currently the 7th most-used plugin with 1,930,345 current users.
...I'll wait for version 20.0.1 which will be released, if history is any indicator, on Thursday.
I don't know... I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
They're up to Firefox 21 already? I wonder what features this new Firefox 22 contains, and whether it's worth getting this Firefox 23.
Has anyone downloaded Firefox 24 yet? I want to know if Firefox 25 is any good.
(Hope I'm not falling too far behind in my version numbers since starting this post).
The ability to stop the animation of an irritating animated image by pressing Esc.
I can't drive 55. I can't run 55 either, but that's an entirely different issue...
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Nope. Just tested this, and the second private browsing window automatically picked up the login session from the first private browsing window.
I notice that they retained the "I'll just randomly decide to hide the browser window you're looking at under all the other windows on your desktop" 'feature', though...
Pretty much everything you and the GP poster mention are either options that can be configured (I still have a separate stop button, and URLs display the protocol at the front), things that can be fixed with add-ons (status bar), or things that aren't an issue (The theme I chose quite a few versions ago is displayed after every update with no issue, and "Tabs on Top" has been configurable through a context menu for as long as the option has existed, but once you set it, it's done, so who needs a menu?).
The last few Firefox releases have resulted in a much faster browser that uses a lot less memory. Even if I couldn't easily configure all the changes to default settings back to my liking, I'd still call it an overall win. Right now, the Android version needs the most work, as it is lagging far behind in features, especially on tablets, where you have the screen real estate to do much more.
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
Time to close all your browser windows.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
> Chrome did not initially have incognito, that came later.
WRONG. It was there since day 1. It was even in the fricking comic -- page 22.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
What I want is private browsing a on a per-site basis. So when I am on the NYTimes, there is one cookie store for the NYTimes (and all the embedded stuff on the NYTimes pages) and when I am on ESPN it is a completely seperate cookie store for ESPN and embeds. That way if both NYTimes and ESPN use some of the same trackers, each tracker gets a different cookie from me based on the site the tracker was embedded in.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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).
So Firefox is now at 20, Chrome is now at 26.
Looks like they are finally going to reach their goal of overtaking chrome.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
HOW did this get modded +5 Informative? It's blatantly WRONG. Incognito has been in since Chrome launch. It was one of the main advertised features of the damn thing.
More retarded: I've now spent enough time customizing Firefox to simply act more like it used to that there is no conceivable way that I will ever be able to rebuild it from scratch.
Fun.
Kid-proof tablet..
point release = bugfix, security fix
major release = new features
Seriously, its not as if this hasnt been answered about a zillion times already.
Correct. All Private Browsing windows share the same session. Once the last Private Browsing window has been closed, though, the session is discarded. Open a new private window and you'll have to log in again.