1704200 - Allow to disable private browsing on a per profile basis

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Private Browsing, enhancement)

Description

[Mina Galić]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:88.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/88.0

Steps to reproduce:

Currently, it is possible disable private browsing via Policy, globally for the entire installation:

https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/#disableprivatebrowsing

Expected results:

i would like to be able to disable it on a profile basis

Comment 1

[Robin Steuber (she/her) [:bytesized]]

I already confirmed that the enterprise policy does not work for this user's usecase, but I'll link to the relevant bug anyways.

Comment 2

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

By profile do you mean Firefox profile? Or user on Linux?

Comment 3

[Robin Steuber (she/her) [:bytesized]]

User indicated Firefox profile on Matrix.

Comment 4

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Private Browsing' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 5

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Policy on per user profile is not something we're going to do (or even can easily do).

If you want to do this, you can put user.js files into the various profiles to accomplish this.

Policy is intended to work per machine or per operating system user, not individual profiles in the browser (not just in Firefox, but in general in other applications).

If policy were per profile, users could just add a new profile to bypass policy.

Comment 6

[Robin Steuber (she/her) [:bytesized]]

Policy on per user profile is not something we're going to do (or even can easily do).

I just confirmed with the user that they aren't specifically asking for an Enterprise Policy. They want a setting/pref that hides all the Private Browsing-related interfaces when running that profile.

If you want to do this, you can put user.js files into the various profiles to accomplish this.

Out of curiosity, what would you put in the user.js to accomplish this? Would it be possible to do the same in a webextension?

Comment 7

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Yeah, I looked more and it's not just a pref. The policy does more interesting things to block private browsing.

You could write some custom Autoconfig script probably to make this happen, but it would be complicated.

What's the use case? Where can I see the discussion?

Comment 8

[Mina Galić]

main use case can be found here: https://igalic.co/thoughts/2020-05-30-social-apps-in-firefox.html (careful it's still a draft and might be rough around the edges)

to summarise: rather than using something like Rambox or Franz to host all my social media, i started using a dedicated Firefox profile with all the apps (websites) pinned in their own containers

that's already pretty private, imo, and if i need to do private browsing, i do so in my Browser browser.
seeing as there's no plugin that intercepts links that don't belong to any configured container, and send them to my main browser, either by calling our to it via OS methods, or i via Firefox Sync, i resorted to just calling Send Link to Device myself

for that i have to open the context menu and that's why I started reducing the entries that menu so heavily

• Private Browsing
• Search: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1704198
• and bookmarks

all feel out of place for an application container

As does opening stuff in a New Window, or the options for specific containers, if I'm honest

Comment 9

[Andrei Purice]

Since this is an Enhancement I will set it to New to gain more visibility.

Comment 10

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

This is not something we'll do in product, but, I can give you a simple way to do it.

If you set the environment variable XPCSHELL_TEST_PROFILE_DIR=1 before starting Firefox, it allows you to use a preference to point to a policies.json file:

browser.policies.alternatePath

/foo/bar/xx.json

If the pref is not set, it has no effect.

So for the cases where you don't want private browsing, you can point to a JSON file like this:

{
"policies": {
"DisablePrivateBrowsing": true
}
}

Note you'll see some extra things on the console by setting this environment variable, but it shouldn't affect Firefox.