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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i know exactly what you mean, op.
my approach is to use multiple browsers. firefox for my ‘main’ main (emails, clean youtube, banking), librewolf for real main (lemmy, etc), vivaldi for youtube, waterfox and falkon for others (dev docs).
I use the Temporary Containers you mentioned, and find it to work very well. A couple of tips:
- I use standard (named) containers for sites I frequently visit, so that I don’t need to log in every time. You can set a website to always open in a certain container.
- For the browser restart problem, I just manually middle-click to open the tabs I want from my previous session, which opens them in a fresh temporary container. Indeed the old container state is gone, but I don’t really find it to be a problem.
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?
Can you please link me to a guide or something, how do I configure firefox to use containers automatically? I guess I want two containers, for the sites I trust just one “regular” container and open everything else (except a few whitelisted sites) in a “throwaway” container that I can remove and create again to get rid of all local data. How do I “whitelist” a few sites to open in container 1 and configure firefox to open everything else in container 2?
UPD: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/462
So 8 years passed and still no possibility to set default container for Ctrl + T or “+” on tab bar in UI…
I don’t think you need a guide. Just install the extension and give it a try. It’s pretty simple and intuitive.
still no possibility to set default container for Ctrl + T
It might be possible now, you could give it a try. But anyways, I don’t see how changing the default container for new tabs could be useful. There is a default container which is the “no container”, why would you want to change it?
EDIT: yes, it is possible now.
Someone can probably make an addon that adds a new right click on links that generates a new container and then deletes it after the tab is closed.
What I do is disable cookies except for a few sites I use often and trust not to fingerprint me too much. Then if Firefox closes I still have the history and can reopen windows. I also use arkenfox user.js and disable JavaScript using unlock (for the 5 websites that run without js these days) for some extra privacy
Can you tell me more about where do I disable cookies and add exceptions for sites which I do want to store cookies? Does this also remove data other than cookeis (cache, local storage etc.)?
In the ‘Privacy and Security’ tab in settings theres a checkbox for ‘Clear cookies and site data every time you close Firefox’ and just above it a button where you can go to insert exceptions to the rule. Yeah I think that’ll also remove local storage. Not sure about cache. You can have a little more granular control using the Customize History feature but cookies and local storage are always gonna be linked
Edit: Actually I had forgotten how this works. the clear cookies checkbox automatically enables customized history and you must go there to choose what gets deleted, otherwise it’ll remove history as well.
To be honest I never thought of that and this looks like exactly what I need. Do you know if it works with subdomains, so if I add example.com to exceptions will it also store cookies from subdomain.example.com ? However I’m not sure if cookies are being stored by a subdomain or the main domain for some sites, for example there are sites that host user’s blog at user.website.com .
Also I wish there was a button in address bar or somewhere else to simply click and “Add an exception to allow storing cache and cookies”.
UPD: Press Alt, go to Tools -> Page info (or press Ctril+I) -> Permissions, there is a button to Allow Set Cookies there.
Thank you very much, I never noticed such a setting!
Glad it’s useful to you. Your update might also prove useful to me, so thanks!
Maybe you should look into TOR browser.
No, I’m not looking for Tor.
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)
Thank you. Maybe there’s some extension to quickly destroy site data (cache, local storage, cookies, history entries) when closing tabs? Like a second button next to “close tab” that says “destroy site data and close tab”.
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?
When I have a firefox running, can I launch the second firefox instance with a different profile without closing my first firefox instance?
firefox --Profile $(mktemp -d)
It’ll still hit your disk though (depending on how/tmpis set up) which private mode won’t AFAIK.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.
The only issue with that is that I need to manage 2 browsers I guess (install two sets of extensions, to two sets of about:config changes, change new options in settings twice etc.). Thank you for suggestion.
Hey, I’m tightening up my privacy like you. I’m not sure if containers are the best way to go, but Mullvad Browser is essentially what you are looking for. Its a firefox fork that has complete fingerprinting protection baked in. Its basically tor browser minus the tor network. Both it and tor have a button (“New Identity” feature) you can click to completely clean your session (cookies cache etc) without closing the browser.
You can also see what your fingerprinting profile by looks like using the EFF’s “Cover Your Tracks”. It also reports how unique your browser is, but don’t use this as a metric of how private and secure you are, since there are many other aspects you need to factor.
I use containers and made on for all google sites, one for Amazon, one for news sites, etc. And why don’t you configure your Browser so that all data and caches are deleted when you close the browser? it is the same effect as private browsing without the flag private browsing. And if you want to avoid tracking, do you use a DNS service like AdguardDNS or NextDNS? And for fingerprinting you could use Mullvad or Librefox Browser. But they break some websites, both support containers.
And why don’t you configure your Browser so that all data and caches are deleted when you close the browser?
Doesn’t it also close all tabs on close and remove all history? Can I add exceptions to this? So that tabs stay the same after a restart, and few sites (like mastodon) keep their cookies, but everything that is not whitelisted gets the data cleaned.
With Librewolf or Brave you can only reopen the browser with all last pages or none. But you can ask in both browsers for each specific page you like for a exception to keep cookies and website data. This is how I’m rolling. And I block all scripts and only make exceptions when I need them on a homepage. In Librewolf I use UBlock for this, Brave has its own setting for this.
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.
Thank you for your advice.
