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Proposal: Private browsing by default, or Firefox Focus mode #419
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I agree this could be an option that we should consider in this experiment. Where the user opening a link from an external application gets a private tab or even "first party isolation" for this link (where external app opening both example.com and otherexample.com are considered separate browsing contexts). The user then has to assign it into a container with either #311 or the new assign feature released today. Related bugs:
Questions:
Note: |
thinking about this feature, a mode where each new tab, wherever it comes from (external, link from another tab, etc.) is opened with full isolation (like if it is alone in its new temp container) if it is not assigned to a given container would be interesting. |
Potentially, but I could also see links from sites that open a new tab to a different domain.
All of the above. I'm mostly after the isolation and tracking protection, but it all sounds appropriate.
This could be enough, but getting in the way of opening a site the user has clicked on might be enough of an annoyance to have the feature disabled. I thought having the default context into which a new tab is opened be private by default would be a good compromise, and for me it's what's working well on my phone. I saw someone say that per-container session and privacy prefs would be a way to solve this. That seems plausible. One could just set the default container to be like private browsing, and the others to preserve more stuff. But I do like what you said about "first party isolation", because even a fully private mode default container would allow sites you open in the same session to leak to each other. |
If we are adding this UI then we likely would need to let the users control what "non container" looks like also as per #356 |
What I've been looking for is a private by default mode unless the domain is whitelisted. Private here would mean, no history, cookies, caches, local storage, etc. survive the browser session. A whitelist would allow the user to choose whom to trust and not trust anything else by default. For most users this would be a small list of domains. The current setup is more of a all or nothing approach, which makes using private browsing unnecessarily complicated since you are now signed out of all the stuff you'd normally have white listed just so you can visit that one domain you want to keep private. Having to alt tab between windows to go private is tedious and error prone (one click in the wrong window and you are now back to non private mode). I'd like similar a whitelist approach for things like auto playing video, begging for notification privileges, and other annoyances that mostly seem to be abused by obnoxious websites rather than be of genuine use but there are the occasional websites where I actually do want this. Just auto denying any privileges until I say otherwise would be perfect. This seems to be hard/impossible currently and I've found no good extensions that do this either (I've been looking). |
Since I'd say this is somewhat similar to #929 and that is marked as "extra add-on", I thought I'll leave a link to an Add-on I'm building here that aims to achieve "Container isolated browsing by default" |
In case someone finds this workaround useful, I've already been mimicking this behavior on Linux for quite a while now (minus the whitelisting of websites), by making The way to do this depends on your DE. Also, some apps don't respect xdg-open (e.g. If Firefox is not already open, this results in only opening a new Firefox private instance (similar behavior as launching |
@ChaoticMind Interesting, but I think setting |
For anyone still following along, @stoically (above) has continued to do an amazing job on the "Temporary Containers" extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/ I also recommend reading the Medium article linked in the addon description. Check out the code here: https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers Mad kudos to @stoically for this extension. The available options are great, and it's a huge win for web privacy! |
Consider the workflow (and variations) at #469 (comment) |
I've been using a Focus beta on my phone as my default browser for a few days now and I really like it. It allows me to protect my privacy by default, but easily switch to full Firefox if I want or need to for my passwords or existing sessions. This has gotten me thinking that I'd love that workflow on my desktop. Here's how I think it could work and how it will be even better because of container tabs:
This means that if I click something that I don't want in my history this is the default. If I want to do normal stuff I can move it to normal window or immediately open it in a container. I should still be able to directly use the normal Firefox browsing mode, but this would be the flow for external links and opening new tabs. It's pretty much the exact opposite of the current normal vs. private browsing mode use case.
It could be that this is possible today via a collection of addons, and if so I'd be happy to hear about it. But I do think that this more private by default mode without having to go full "always private mode" would be a nice built-in feature for the browser eventually.
This is perhaps a conversation for the broader Firefox community, but I thought I'd see what this group thought first since I feel like it fits nicely with the container concepts.
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