481785 - No indication of 'Private Browsing' in window title when having enabled "Always on" Private Browsing Mode

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Firefox :: Private Browsing, defect)

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3) Gecko/20090305 Firefox/3.1b3 ID:20090305133223

If you have set the preference browser.privatebrowsing.autostart to true and restart the browser, there is no indication that you are running in private browsing mode. With set pref set to false we show the "(Private Browsing)" string in the window title. So there is no indication for the user which shows the current mode he is working in.

Comment 1

[(no longer active)]

This is by design, because we don't want to consistently remind the user that they are in private browsing mode if they have configured their browser to always be in that mode.

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Yep, exactly.

Comment 4

[crysman]

I am against this "by design" feature. It should be indicated, because it is active - it doesn't matter if you have activated it through options or by opening a private window explicitly.

If you want it this way, OK, add another checkbox ("don't indicate private mode when always on"). This is the correct solution.

Comment 5

[crysman]

I am very sorry to read this ticket being marked as "VERIFIED INVALID". I still do not understand why. I would understand "delayed for low priority" or something, but "INVALID"? Too bad for Mozilla. I am using mostly Chromium anyway, but events and approaches like this just make me un-like Mozilla even more. You could give users option, so they could decide themselves if to hide it or not. But you decided for them, because you know better what users want, right?

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I'm sorry you took that personally, but invalid is just a resolution value in our bug tracker, nothing more than that. This bug has been marked as invalid cause what was pointed out as a bug in comment 0, was instead the expected browser behavior (working as designed). Remember this is not a discussion forum or a feedback dashboard, it's a tickets tracker for developers.
You could easily create an add-on that detects permanent private browsing and themes the browser as if PB was active, and users interested in that feature could install the add-on. Add-ons are Firefox strength cause they allow you to make it like you want.

Comment 7

[Sebastian Zartner [:sebo]]

(In reply to :Ehsan Akhgari (busy, don't ask for review please) from comment #1)
> This is by design, because we don't want to consistently remind the user
> that they are in private browsing mode if they have configured their browser
> to always be in that mode.

I am wondering what's the reasoning behind that. As the private browsing indication shrunk to a mask icon within the window title, I assume that people using their own device would not be bothered much while people using a public device like in an internet café would benefit from it.

Sebastian