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.