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."

Comments

Re:like it's 2008 all over again

[Shimbo]

Chrome had it for 5 years now...

Nice troll, but as Chrome didn't exist 5 years ago, somewhat implausible.

Re:like it's 2008 all over again

[increment1]

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.

Re:Version 20?

[jfdavis668]

Firefox is going exponential. Can't wait for the next version, Firefox v2^5

Embarrasing

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Embarrasing

[TypoNAM]

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.

And that index is disturbing...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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?

Re:And that index is disturbing...

[Stumbles]

I just checked that and you are right. The download manager showed things I thought were deleted.

Re:And that index is disturbing...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.