this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
35 points (94.9% liked)

Firefox

22737 readers
2 users here now

/c/firefox

A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox.


Rules

1. Adhere to the instance rules

2. Be kind to one another

3. Communicate in a civil manner


Reporting

If you would like to bring an issue to the moderators attention, please use the "Create Report" feature on the offending comment or post and it will be reviewed as time allows.


founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hello everyone.

This is a "need help" or "ELI5" post, hope anyone can be nice and explain me.

So, one thing about Firefox (and web browsing in general) I do is, I use private browsing mode, almost all the time. I have a "normal" firefox window with a few tabs I use daily, and a second firefox window which is in private browsing. I use it to just do everything else: dive into rabbit holes, open links, do a web search, watch a youtube video etc.

I do it mainly for privacy reasons, I don't want websites to track me, fingerprint me etc. I also don't want to store any cookies and stuff.

I'm mostly satisfied with the workflow I have, but the one problem is that sometimes firefox will update and ask for a restart, or maybe crash, or maybe I need to reboot my laptop or it will get discharge and turn off, then I lose all of my open tabs. Sometimes I can copy the URLs of tabs I want to keep, and open them again after a restart, sometimes I can't. I'm mostly ok with starting fresh, however sometimes I'm a bit sad about losing the tabs I liked or did not finish reading.

I think my "always open everything in private mode" workflow makes more problems than it solves. The thing is, I do not understand how normal mode behaves when compared to private browsing mode. I know there's "Enhanced Protection" and "Total Protection" modes in settings, but how do they work compared to private browsing? Also there's a button to clear cookies, but there's many other things other than cookies, such as session storage, indexed DB storage, cache etc. When I use private browsing, I 100% know everything about the site I had open gets destroyed. This means if I open a youtube and watch a minecraft video, I won't get full home page of minecraft video recommendations next time I open youtibe again, if I use private browsing mode.

Can I achieve this without private browsing? I think I can use a container, but in this case I would basically want every single tab I open be in a separate container, and this is way too much work to do manually. Also I would want containers to be destroyed after I close the tab.

(The only exception to every tab being in their own container is when I open a link to the same domain from withing a container, for example if I go from reddit homepage in a "temporary reddit container" to a reddit post in a new tab, I would want that post tab be in the same container)

I know there exists an extension called temporary containers, but last time I tried it, I think it had some weird behaviors: IIRC after a browser restart every tab that was open in a temporary container, got reopened outside of containers (so my browser became "dirty" with all the cookies and cache and etc. of every tab I had open in temporary containers previously).

I've heard somewhere (probably reddit Firefox sub) that either enhanced or total protection mode basically do what I want: they make every domain/subdomain to be isolated and behave as if each site had it's own container. Is that true? Then the only thing I would need is a way to destroy site data when there's no open tabs that use said data.

TL:DR; How do I make all randomly open tabs in my browser to not keep their data (cookies, cache, other local stored data) after I close the tab as if I was opening them in private mode? Not being kept in browsing history would also be nice, but that I can clean manually from time to time.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] vort3@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

When I have a firefox running, can I launch the second firefox instance with a different profile without closing my first firefox instance?