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Comment by omosubi | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully this spurs more than a few people to move to Firefox. Im not looking forward to an all chrome/chromium future

I agree that more of us should use Firefox, though if you're switching because of this bug, you may be in for some disappointment.

https://armin.dev/blog/2019/03/firefox-extensions-browsing-d...

Those bugs are all extension bugs. The built-in option to "clear data on exit" that Firefox has in about:preferences seems not affected by them. Although of course they should be fixed.

But it is affected. It's very easy to confirm that even with "Clear data on exit" activated, websites recognize you across sessions.

That could be due to fingerprinting, your IP address etc, which is much harder to anonymize.

"Clear data on exit" means remove all traces of me visiting websites from my device. It has nothing to do with how the websites will operate if I decide to do so.

Firefox has its own problems in this realm, namely that all "Private" windows/tabs share a single session that persists as long as any of them exist.

I discovered this recently when I logged in to website X in a Private window, then closed the window without explicitly logging out, and returned to X later that day. I had another Private window open (with a completely different site). I was still logged in to X! because that second Private window had preserved the session.

This means, of course, that sites you visit simultaneously in separate Private windows are not isolated from each other either.

I still am mostly happy with Firefox and use it daily, but this was a completely unexpected and unwelcome behavior.

Maybe this is a platform dependant issue? On Arch each private window is independent, or so it seems. I was actually hoping for what you describe and instead found that when visiting my company website in two different private windows I had to login to each window separately. I found this so annoying because accessing some system amin tools on a few of our pages requires an annoying number of steps.

Surely you could open it in a separate tab in the same window and then drag the tab out into a new window?

I'm on arch and Firefox 66.0.1 and for me the Private windows do share a session. Containers also fixed it for me, but when I discovered this it was very unexpected

Yes, I wanted to use Firefox private windows To limit the scope of privileged cookies (like I can with Safari) but they are no use for that.

The multi-account containers extension mostly solves the problem for me https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account... though I wish it was more convenient to open a tab in a specific container, and to discard and create containers.

Yep, I've been using containers; the core functionality is great, but it really needs some UI love. I found an extension for opening a new tab in a container: https://github.com/gsomoza/firefox-easy-container-shortcuts which helps. Likely there are other helper add-ons.

also (thanks to little snitch) even though I closed a tab visiting a site, little snitch still shows activity to that site afterwards.

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