283024 - Privacy Mode rather than having clear Clear History, Clear Cache etc.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 248970

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[David Boden]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

A "Privacy Mode" would be a unique selling point (or in FireFox's case, a unique
giving away point) for the browser. 

The reason that most people want to Clear History, Clear Cache, Clear Forms etc.
is because they have been surfing pages that, for a variety of reasons, they
don't want anyone else who might use the computer to see.

Clearing history is a pain, because most of the time they want to keep their
history... they just don't want to record some of the pages they were surfing.

How about having a mode that you could easily switch to that:
1. Temporarily protects privacy by not recording any browser history, caching
any pages, storing any form fields etc.
2. Not storing anything whatsoever to disk. Nothing. No cached pages. No URLs.
Nothing.


What a great feature for someone using a work laptop at home to surf whatever
they want without the company ever having a chance of knowing.

Think about it. Why do you ever reach for the clear history button? Wouldn't you
rather be able to temporarily go into a "Privacy Mode" and not bother deleting
all your useful history, cached pages etc.?

What a great differentiator against Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer puts
all sorts of rubbish onto disk, into your registry!

Thanks for reading.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[KhanReaper]

Even though Firefox already has its "Clear Privacy Data" feature, I would like
to see some sort of a command line flag or option in preferences become
available such that the Mozilla product automatically clears this information
upon quitting or starting the browser.

Maybe it would be nice, too, if another option would not even let this
information be retained at all on the hard disk.

While one can argue that the "Clear Privacy Data" feature is enough and it
should be the user's responsibility for clearing this information, I would have
to disagree. Without data security responsibility being educated and imbued into
users in some effective way, this notion of personal responsibility may be too
much to ask. Countless times I see too much personal information (e.g., such as
sessions remaining on commercial web sites) on the computers at my school using
Firefox. This is very dangerous in my opinion, and I think it would be wise to
have a feature that can be enabled never to let this information be stored.

Comment 2

[David Boden]

(In reply to comment #1)

The Clear Privacy Data feature really doesn't cut the mustard. By that time, the
information has already been written to your hard disk. So, maybe FireFox erases
the data, but does it overwrite it with 0s ten times in order to be sure that
the data has actually gone off the disk? I doubt it.

The Clear Privacy Data is useful in some situations, but I'm talking about real
security / privacy. On a shared PC, that's what you want.

Comment 3

[Glenn Randers-Pehrson]

*** Bug 356758 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Ivan Ičin]

please mark this as duplicate of bug 248970

Comment 5

[Glenn Randers-Pehrson]

Yes, it is a dupe.  Marking it so.