Firefox 20 Arrives With Per-Window Private Browsing, New Download Manager 181
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 20 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The improvements include per-window private browsing, a new download manager in the Firefox toolbar, and the ability to close hanging plugins without the browser hanging. The new desktop version was available as of yesterday on the organization's FTP servers, but that was just the initial release of the installers. Firefox 20 has now officially been made available over on Firefox.com and all users of old Firefox versions should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on the official Google Play Store. The changelogs are here: desktop and Android."
Re:like it's 2008 all over again (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds a bit different since Chrome supports one private browsing cookie store, and one general cookie store. If you have two private browsing chrome windows (or tabs) they both use the same private browsing cookie store.
Firefox now sounds like it supports multiple private browsing cookie stores, so you could login to the same site 3 or 4 or however many times with different private windows, whereas with chrome you can only login twice at the same time.
Embarrasing (Score:5, Interesting)
seriously ?, the new download "manager" is nothing of the sort, it manages nothing, as soon as i click the downloads button it opens the entire library (and the cpu sucking waiting time for it to open), which is asking to show me ALL my history, bookmarks AND downloads in a whole another window, not a little onobtrusive window like before, and no that terrible chromeless!!? overlay doesn't count, good job iam not disabled egh ? what a total waste of time
as for information, it wastes space like nothing else, 200px tall rows for 1 line of 12px text ? (the name of the downloaded file whoo), no extra info or details about the download at all other than apparently its on my hard drive, no exact link, speed, time completed, size, referer, server details etc etc
absolute garbage, an embarrasment to mention it other than WTF have you done ?, and iam looking for a replacement addon as we speak HALP
And that index is disturbing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, that's freaky.
I routinely delete things like download history when I've no further need for the files, partly as a tidiness thing and partly as a privacy thing. (This is a work machine that I use for my consulting/contracting gigs, including screen sharing for presentations/teleconferencing from time to time, so both tidiness and discretion are often called for.)
Suddenly, when I go to Tools->Downloads, there's a whole list of everything I downloaded since forever, not least a few potentially sensitive financial records and a whole trail of breadcrumbs identifying clients and various commercial research I've been doing on their behalf. The files are long gone, of course, but it's a good thing that lot didn't show up in the middle of a screen-sharing session with a different client.
What's more disturbing is that despite being reasonably careful about these things, or so I thought, Firefox has apparently been keeping a detailed record of these downloads even though I'd been clearing the old Downloads dialog regularly. What else is it storing away somewhere that I don't know about?
Re:And that index is disturbing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, remarkably it turns out that grown-ups use the Internet for things that need privacy other than the one you're thinking of. In this case, I was looking at every bank account number for my company, since among my recent downloads were records from on-line banking to do our taxes and the files were named after each account. Sorry if that wasn't the giggly story you were hoping for, but when you're old enough to have a bank account and a job of your own, I'm sure you'll understand.
For Per-Window, Should be Per-Site (Score:4, Interesting)
What I want is private browsing a on a per-site basis. So when I am on the NYTimes, there is one cookie store for the NYTimes (and all the embedded stuff on the NYTimes pages) and when I am on ESPN it is a completely seperate cookie store for ESPN and embeds. That way if both NYTimes and ESPN use some of the same trackers, each tracker gets a different cookie from me based on the site the tracker was embedded in.
Re:And that index is disturbing... (Score:4, Interesting)
This may make me stop using firefox permanently if they are keeping hidden duplicates of all the logs. Seriously, where were these things logged and why did it never delete it with the other history logs?
Did we just find a secret government backdoor? /tinfoil hat