541442 - Private Browsing unavailable after 3.6 upgrade

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Private Browsing, defect)

Description

[Chris Brousseau]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Used private browsing yesterday in 3.5.something - used update feature under help menu and successfully upgraded to 3.6.  Now private browsing is unavailable/greyed out under the Tools menu and the keyboard commands don't work. 

I went to about:config, searched on private and found that this entry:  wser.privatebrowsing.autostart    had been changed to "true".  On a lark, I changed it to 'false' - restarted firefox, and now private browsing is working fine.

Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Upgrade firefox using menu item under Help
2.  Restart browser
3.  Try private browsing
Actual Results:  
Private browsing was unavailable as described

Expected Results:  
Kept the feature available as it was before the upgrade

Comment 1

[(no longer active)]

Had you done something like this before the upgrade (in Firefox 3.5): going to Tools, Options, Privacy, and selecting "Firefox will never remember history"?

Comment 2

[Chris Brousseau]

Yes - that setting was in place for a long time before the upgrade.

Comment 3

[(no longer active)]

Well, that setting puts Firefox into a mode called "permanent private browsing", which means that the Private Browsing mode is turned on from the moment you start your browser and will remain on for the entire session.  So, leaving the menu items for starting/stopping the private browsing mode does not make a lot of sense.  That's why we're disabling them.  The same thing happened in Firefox 3.5 as well, and nothing has changed in Firefox 3.6 in that regard.

Comment 4

[Chris Brousseau]

So that makes sense from a technical perspective - but the behavior is different in 3.5, since the private browsing options were still available, and the private browsing screen would still pop up in 3.5.

Comment 5

[(no longer active)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> So that makes sense from a technical perspective - but the behavior is
> different in 3.5, since the private browsing options were still available, and
> the private browsing screen would still pop up in 3.5.

I don't think that is true.  In 3.5 the same thing happened: the private browsing command was disabled as soon as the permanent private browsing mode was turned on.

Comment 6

[Chris Brousseau]

Well - don't want to belabor this, but the reason I noted this issue was because the behavior was different.  In 3.5 when I went into private browsing, with the setting that apparantly put the browser into 'permanent private browsing' -- I saw the flash screen explaining that I was entering private browsing mode.  This happened every time, as I wasn't aware that the modes were entirely identical.  Anyway, that was the behavior I observed...