1172786 - Allow restricting a session to a single tab (to allow using multiple accounts of same domain, or developing with a multiple fresh sessions)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 117222

(Firefox :: Private Browsing, defect)

Description

[donrhummy]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20150525141253

Steps to reproduce:

Wanted an option such as:

    Open Link in New Sandboxed Tab

which would allow restricting the session to just that tab. This would allow someone with multiple google accounts to open each in a different tab. 

For example, I use a google account for Play Music but also have a work (developer) google account that I use for email, documents and other work related things. 


Actual results:

The private tab is not enough because Firefox only allows one private session at a time so if I need to open something with a fresh session, I'd have to close ALL private tabs first.


Expected results:

I should have the ability to open a tab which has a sandboxed session that is separate from the rest of Firefox.

Comment 1

[Abe - QA (:Abe_LV)]

Hey Donrhummy, Thank you for reporting this.
Are you still getting the same issue in the latest version ?

Comment 2

[donrhummy]

(In reply to Abe - QA from comment #1)
> Hey Donrhummy, Thank you for reporting this.
> Are you still getting the same issue in the latest version ?

Yes, of course. Firefox currently only has one private session. So if you open a private window and log in to something, and then open a new private window, that same account will be logged in. This is fine in most cases, but there are situations where you want to have a new private window session but still keep the other one open.

A suggested solution:

1. Have two buttons: "New Private Window" and "New Private Window with Isolated Session"
2. Clicking the first button acts the same as currently, where every private window has that same session
3. The second button would ALWAYS open a new private session that's separate from any others (maybe have diff colors for each?). Any windows opened from this main window and its child windows would share this session only

Comment 3

[Bob Owen (:bobowen)]

(Looks like this is to do with Private Browsing rather than process sandboxing.)

I'm pretty sure that this is by design.
As I understand it, Private Browsing is more about not permanently storing most information for that session and now also preventing many other instances of tracking by websites.

It is not designed to give multiple separate "guest" sessions, to work around what one might consider to be badly designed or implemented web sites, which allow/encourage multiple user accounts to be created, but don't provide their own separation.
(By the way, there is a way to "Add account" on google sites to sign into multiple accounts at once, but I sometimes run into issues with it.)

If you don't have too many separate accounts, you might find running with separate profiles would solve your problem.
This will run an entirely new instance of Firefox to separate your work and other browsing.
You can do this by running as follows:

firefox -no-remote

This will give you the profile manager. If you know what profile you want you can use:

firefox -no-remote -P "<profile name>"


Ehsan - I'm guessing you already have a bug to which you usually duplicate requests like this.

Comment 4

[Bob Owen (:bobowen)]

I forgot to suggest that there might be add-ons to help with using separate profiles.

After a quick search, Profile Switcher seems to be the most popular one.
I've not used it myself, so I can't comment on how well it works.

Comment 5

[Jed Davis [:jld] ⟨⏰|UTC-7⟩ ⟦he/him⟧]

Comment #0 sounds like the same kind of use case as Contextual Identity (bug 1191418).

Comment 6

[Josh Matthews [:jdm]]

We usually dup requests like this to bug 117222.

Comment 7

[Jed Davis [:jld] ⟨⏰|UTC-7⟩ ⟦he/him⟧]

(In reply to Jed Davis [:jld] from comment #5)
> Comment #0 sounds like the same kind of use case as Contextual Identity (bug
> 1191418).

Let me rephrase that.  This, from comment #0, is exactly a use case for Contextual Identity:

> For example, I use a google account for Play Music but also have a work (developer) google account that I use for email, documents and other work related things.

In that case one would probably want both the work and personal sessions to be persistent, but separate.  A super-private-browsing mode would allow separating any number of those, but only one of them would keep state; the rest would have to be signed back into every time.