1048286 - When launching FF in permanent private browsing mode (with the -private option), only the initial window has the indicator that it's private.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Private Browsing, defect, P3)

Description

[Kostas]

Attachment: without icon.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140716183446

Steps to reproduce:

- Launch FF 31 (or even, todays's Nightly with BuildID 20140804030205)  in permanent private browsing mode with the "-private" option:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -private
- Examine the Tab Bar (see the screenshots)
- Try to launch another Private window by either pressing:
hamburger button>New Private window , or
Alt>File>New Private window , or
Ctrl+Shift+P



Actual results:

1. The "blue mask" icon is missing from the Tab bar.
2. A normal window is opened, instead of a private window.


Expected results:

1. The "blue mask" icon should appear.
2. A private window should open.

Comment 1

[Kostas]

Attachment: with icon.png

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

The icon thing is explained in bug 906117.

I would assume that we don't show you the page again because, well, all your windows are private, that's what the -private switch does. I don't see why you'd want to see the same page all the time when it's less useful than the default new tab page / home page.

If you're seeing the new window you've opened leave behind history after a Firefox restart, please reopen and adjust the summary.

Comment 3

[Kostas]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch (Bugmail catchup, needinfo if urgent) from comment #2)
> The icon thing is explained in bug 906117.
Ok, thanks.

> I would assume that we don't show you the page again because, well, all your
> windows are private, that's what the -private switch does. I don't see why
> you'd want to see the same page all the time when it's less useful than the
> default new tab page / home page.
> 
> If you're seeing the new window you've opened leave behind history after a
> Firefox restart, please reopen and adjust the summary.
No, the new window that opens, doesn't leave behind history after a Firefox restart.


The problem exists though:
currently, when launching FF in permanent private browsing mode,
only the first window has the indicator that it's private.
But you open one more private window (eg. in order to have some other tabs in it),
it appears as if it's a normal window, thus confusing the user.

I believe that this is a Firefox bug.
SO I reopened the bug and adjusted the summary, keeping only the second part of it.

Comment 4

[Graham Perrin]

… as if it's a normal window, thus confusing the user. …

+1

See also: bug 1521372

Comment 5

[Roger Zanoni]

Hello, I'm playing around with this, but I'm not sure I'm doing the changes in the right places:

• I managed to make the new open window to display a private window (about:privatebrowsing instead of regular new window) by changing OpenBrowsingWindow and forcing the default args in browser/base/content/browser.js
• When a new tab is opened in permanent private browsing mode, about:privatebrowsing should be opened as well? I did a test and changed browser/base/content/utilityOverlay.js to achieve this behavior

I'm still learning how to make the mask icon appear in the new window

Comment 9

[Cristian Baica [:cbaica], Release Desktop QA]

As far as I know, the -private tag is intended to launch Firefox directly into private browsing mode only, NOT permanent private browsing mode. From my findings, that can be done from about:preferences#privacy -> History -> Use custom history settings -> Always use private browsing mode.

As to what was mentioned in comment 3 (I know it was really long ago), but the new window that was opened after using the -private tag, DOES leave behind a history trail.

Comment 10

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Looks like the "private" flag is just completely undocumented at this point and behaves strangely. It tries to create a "temporary permanent private browsing mode", ie behave the same as permanent private browsing mode but minus the pref being flipped. But it doesn't work, because although PrivateBrowsingUtils is updated, lots of other consumers manually check the relevant pref, and it remains at the default value.

-private-window is documented and behaves correctly (ie opens a single private window, and no guarantees or changes about subsequent windows).

Given how old this bug is I don't know how we feel about the future of this flag - given it's not documented in -help, I think either we should remove support (which might surprise people some more!), or we should make it an alias for -private-window and be explicit about that in the help, or we should genuinely fix it which is a bunch of work. Tim, as you're triage owner, wdyt?

Comment 11

[Tim Huang[:timhuang]]

For the long term, I suggest that we can remove the support of this undocumented flag. But I think we should make this transition as smooth as possible. So, my suggestion would be that

• For the short term, make the flag as an alias for -private-window and update the help message.
• Add a telemetry probe to see how many users are still using -private flag
• Based on the data, we can decide how we can proceed.
  • If many users are still using this flag, we might need to do some extra work, like showing a message to users to say that we are going to phase out this flag and please move to use -private-window flag.
• If the usage of this flag is low enough(< 1%), we can do a public announcement, maybe a blog post together with a SUMO page, and then we can remove the flag entirely.