Hello everyone.
This is a “need help” or “ELI5” post, hope anyone can be nice and explain me.
So, one thing about Firefox (and web browsing in general) I do is, I use private browsing mode, almost all the time. I have a “normal” firefox window with a few tabs I use daily, and a second firefox window which is in private browsing. I use it to just do everything else: dive into rabbit holes, open links, do a web search, watch a youtube video etc.
I do it mainly for privacy reasons, I don’t want websites to track me, fingerprint me etc. I also don’t want to store any cookies and stuff.
I’m mostly satisfied with the workflow I have, but the one problem is that sometimes firefox will update and ask for a restart, or maybe crash, or maybe I need to reboot my laptop or it will get discharge and turn off, then I lose all of my open tabs. Sometimes I can copy the URLs of tabs I want to keep, and open them again after a restart, sometimes I can’t. I’m mostly ok with starting fresh, however sometimes I’m a bit sad about losing the tabs I liked or did not finish reading.
I think my “always open everything in private mode” workflow makes more problems than it solves. The thing is, I do not understand how normal mode behaves when compared to private browsing mode. I know there’s “Enhanced Protection” and “Total Protection” modes in settings, but how do they work compared to private browsing? Also there’s a button to clear cookies, but there’s many other things other than cookies, such as session storage, indexed DB storage, cache etc. When I use private browsing, I 100% know everything about the site I had open gets destroyed. This means if I open a youtube and watch a minecraft video, I won’t get full home page of minecraft video recommendations next time I open youtibe again, if I use private browsing mode.
Can I achieve this without private browsing? I think I can use a container, but in this case I would basically want every single tab I open be in a separate container, and this is way too much work to do manually. Also I would want containers to be destroyed after I close the tab.
(The only exception to every tab being in their own container is when I open a link to the same domain from withing a container, for example if I go from reddit homepage in a “temporary reddit container” to a reddit post in a new tab, I would want that post tab be in the same container)
I know there exists an extension called temporary containers, but last time I tried it, I think it had some weird behaviors: IIRC after a browser restart every tab that was open in a temporary container, got reopened outside of containers (so my browser became “dirty” with all the cookies and cache and etc. of every tab I had open in temporary containers previously).
I’ve heard somewhere (probably reddit Firefox sub) that either enhanced or total protection mode basically do what I want: they make every domain/subdomain to be isolated and behave as if each site had it’s own container. Is that true? Then the only thing I would need is a way to destroy site data when there’s no open tabs that use said data.
TL:DR; How do I make all randomly open tabs in my browser to not keep their data (cookies, cache, other local stored data) after I close the tab as if I was opening them in private mode? Not being kept in browsing history would also be nice, but that I can clean manually from time to time.
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Are you talking about these containers?
Each container is isolated from the others. If you don’t want a tab to track you, just use a dedicated container for it.
You can also configure Firefox to always use a dedicated container for certain domains.
As for destroying the data, you probably just need to clear cookies on close. That’s configurable. If you are extra paranoid you can also clear the cache.
Did I miss something?
Maybe you could improve this by using two separate Firefox profiles? One for the normal tabs you keep open all the time, and another for the temporary ones which you can apply much stricter data retention settings to?
Maybe you should look into TOR browser.
I guess the root of your problem is that you sometimes need a browser search history without the browser snoopers, but your browser safeguards are unreliable and have a tendency to leak into a less private process.
Would it be simpler to just do your searches in a default-private browser like librewolf with history deliberately turned on? Safer failure behaviours, better separation from the main process.
Didn’t quite catch the problem. Group tabs by topic and kill containers with volumes when you’re done?
Basically I want each tab to be unable to track me on other tabs, so tab isolation. Does firefox to this in normal containers?
they call it “total cookie protection”, and it’s always enabled. every site gets its own cookie jar, which also includes things like localstorage.
if you’re paranoid you can use multi-account containers together with something like containerise to generate a new container for every domain that isn’t whitelisted, which means it disappears when you close the last tab for that domain. combine that with cookie autodelete and you can wipe whitelisted sites too.
that, or just tell the browser to clean up everything when you close it. that’s one toggle in the settings.
I do it mainly for privacy reasons, I don’t want websites to track me, fingerprint me etc.
I hate to break it to you, but incognito mode is effectively useless for fingerprinting prevention.
Try going to https://fpresearch.httpjames.space/ on both non-incognito and incognito tabs, and you’ll probably find the fingerprints are identical.
Your screen size, exact way your hardware and OS interact with rendering engines, extensions, browser version, IP, and type, etc are all highly identifiable. (doesn’t always work though, but they also use very minimal tracking methods compared to all the data otherwise collected on you by every single site, aggregating your behavior, typing style, etc)
The only true benefit of private browsing is auto-clearing history, cookies, and cache, and being able to use a site without being logged in even if you’re logged in on your main profile. (or being able to log in without staying signed in afterwards on your main profile)
firefox --Profile $(mktemp -d)
It’ll still hit your disk though (depending on how/tmpis set up) which private mode won’t AFAIK.
