484012 - Introduce pref to change the private browsing start page

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Private Browsing, enhancement)

Description

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

This would need some input from ux, and may be a wontfix. We could make 2 prefs, one that contains the address of a special pb page, the other indicating the action taken.

The latter would probably have two options, 1) take me to the special pb page (default), and 2) use my home page.

The reason I think this should be done is so that extensions can provide their own start page, and so that the user should be able to skip the pb page.

Comment 1

[(no longer active)]

Sounds worthwhile.  I don't think having a pref which opens the home page is particularly useful though, because why would someone want to open their home page in private browsing mode?  I mean, that is their home page, which should mean that page is not that much private, I guess...

Comment 2

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Well, I figured since this opens a new browser session, the user may want to navigate to his home page(s). That's one of the reasons I added uiwanted :)

Comment 3

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Attachment: ver. 1

Attaching a patch here for consideration, waiting on code review once there's a decision about the ui. This will bitrot once the patch in bug 481598 lands, I'll update it then (minor update, no code change).

Comment 4

[(no longer active)]

When you're updating this patch later, could you please create a pref branch on the "browser.privatebrowsing." node?

Comment 5

[Simon Bünzli]

Extensions can already load a different page by shipping their own "@mozilla.org/network/protocol/about;1?what=privatebrowsing" implementation. Do we really think that there's a need for customizability than that?

BTW: Your patch doesn't handle multiple homepages (e.g. "about:|about:").

Comment 6

[(no longer active)]

Don't know why I didn't think about this myself, but Simon has a strong point here.  Now I'm leaning towards WONTFIXing this, but I'm leaving this open in order to get others' opinions as well.

Comment 7

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Yeah, didn't think of that. In that case, this would indeed be wontfix, the extension case was really my strong point here...

->WONTFIX (unless anyone else minds)