809180 - Provide some feature detection for private browsing implementations

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: General, defect, P1)

Description

[Jeff Griffiths (:canuckistani) (:⚡︎)]

We're going to have an awkward growing phase between Firefox 19 & 20 where private browsing features are implemented quite differently. Seeing as we will be continuing to implement activate and deactivate as no-ops that emit deprecation warnings for the forseeable future, we should consider implementing a flag that developers can access that indicates if PWPB is implemented in the current runtime.

Strawman:

var hasPWPB = require('private-browsing').hasPerWindowPrivateBrowsing || false;

This property could be a getter that sniffs the current Firefox version.

Thanks to :wenzel for the idea:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2012/11/05/sdk-private-browsing-api-deprecation/comment-page-1/#comment-160596

Comment 1

[Erik Vold [:erikvold] (please needinfo? me)]

I don't think pwpb will be the final iteration, so perhaps a getPBType method would make more sense?

Comment 2

[(no longer active)]

If you're interested in detecting this in the code programatically, you can check for the existence of nsIPrivateBrowsingService.  We will soon remove it in bug 818800.

Comment 3

[Erik Vold [:erikvold] (please needinfo? me)]

https://github.com/mozilla/addon-sdk/commit/6a1aacd6b34ec8cfce1fe2875de45279c8254b54