1893393 - If I have Firefox set to always use Private Browsing, I never get the private browsing disclaimer or reference link

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Private Browsing, defect)

Description

[Chas Belov]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:125.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/125.0

Steps to reproduce:

With Remember history set:

1. File > New Private window
2. Click the + sign in the private window for a new tab
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 multiple times

With Never remember history -or- Custom + Always use private browsing set (restart to use):

1. File > New Private window
2. Click the + sign in the private window for a new tab
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 multiple times

Actual results:

With Remember history set:

For all 3 steps, always get the message "Private window: Firefox clears your search and browsing history when you close all private windows. This doesn’t make you anonymous." as well as a link to more information.

No matter how many times you do steps 1-3 you always get the above result, and there is no way to never show again. So presumably someone at Mozilla considers this message super important.

This is as opposed to the message about private browsing on mobile, which shows up once and I can dismiss by clicking the x.

With Never remember history -or- Custom + Always use private browsing set (restart to use):

I never get the message, not even when I set the preference in settings.

Expected results:

With Remember history set:

Behaving as expected.

With Never remember history -or- Custom + Always use private browsing set (restart to use):

For all 3 steps, always get the message "Private window: Firefox clears your search and browsing history when you close all private windows. This doesn’t make you anonymous." as well as a link to more information.

Comment 1

[Chas Belov]

Note: I am on a desktop (macOS) not mobile.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Widget: Cocoa' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 3

[Tim Huang[:timhuang]]

The current behavior is that we are making the permanent private browsing mode look like a normal browsing window in order to reduce confusion. Therefore, we don't show private browsing specific things in the never remember history mode(which is permanent private browsing mode literally), including the warning message here. If we want to show the private browsing warning for the permanent private browsing mode, we will need to label all windows as private browsing windows in permanent private browsing mode. That's a design decision that we agasint.

Therefore, I will close this for now. We are happy to discuss this further.

Comment 4

[Chas Belov]

I just recently started using the private mode only setting (although I see from other bugs it's been around for years) and I guess I'm going to have to abandon it because it's not a pleasant experience for me.

I find the current behavior confusing and spend an inordinate amount of time not trusting that I'm actually in private mode, so I keep opening my history and my settings to double check. This is brain power I could be using to interact with the websites I'm trying to Private Browse on. Always showing that it's Private Browsing would let me do that. I find the current experience unpleasant at best and time-wasting at worst.

I have about a dozen Firefox profiles and only use Always use private browsing in one of them, although I often private bowse in the other profiles. Having private browsing have a different appearance in only one of my profiles is unsettling.

If you're not going to change this, I will have to turn that feature off in that profile and instead use a custom local launch/home/new window page that reminds me to use private browsing in that profile.

I'm curious as to what kind of usability testing you did before choosing to implement this feature.

Comment 5

[Chas Belov]

Going on the possibility that by "We are happy to discuss this further." you weren't necessarily meaning "discuss here in this issue", I initiated a discussion in Mozilla Connect "Private windows would best always look like private windows" at https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/private-windows-would-best-always-look-like-private-windows/m-p/56487#M19846

Comment 6

[Tim Huang[:timhuang]]

I think moving the discussion to Mozilla Connect is a good idea. Thanks, Chas.