Private Browsing

Private Browsing

Private Browsing was initially designed as a way for the user to browse websites without having those websites show up in the information saved by Firefox to the persistent storage, and/or later be displayed in the Firefox UI. A secondary use case discovered by the way that people were using the feature was being able to log in to two websites using different authentication information at the same time.

The section below highlights the important aspects.

Local privacy

Any data containing details such as the full or partial address of the pages visited by the user, or information saved on behalf of those sites either by the site or Firefox should not be written to the disk in a way that is exposed to the user either through the Firefox UI, or through the typical OR provided mechanisms for viewing the information on the disk. This means writing this information to a custom file, or a SQLite database in the user's profile is not permitted. However, protecting against scenarios such as attacking the disk-based page file used by the OS, or forensic analysis is outside of the scope of Private Browsing. This means that keeping that information in memory without any specific protection against the page being cached to the disk, or against probes inspecting the memory of the process at runtime is outside of the scope of private browsing.

Exceptions

In some specific cases, we decided that for UX reasons, we can take the user action as a request in order for something specific about the website to be remembered, and permit writing such information to the disk. For example, we take bookmarking as an explicit request from the user for the website to be remembered, so we save bookmarks in private windows. (However, we save it as an unvisited bookmark.) As another example, we don't disable saving permissions in the page info dialog from private windows.

Isolation

Two instances of the same website one running in a normal and one running in a private window must be isolated from each other, and be unable to exchange information through the browser. This is the technical reason why we originally had to keep the cookies for such websites separate, since a session cookie set by a private window could be picked up by a non-private instance of the same site and be saved to the disk from there. The only way that we can ensure that information cannot leak from one such site to the other and find its way to the disk is to make them unable to talk to each other, or be treated as the same by Gecko.

The interesting additional use case of simultaneous logins is a byproduct of this design decision.

Stealth

The browser should make it difficult for the website to tell if they are in private browsing mode. Without this level of protection, the websites in the example in the above section could communicate to each other and leak information through their common server by the website in the private window phoning home the information and the other instance picking it up in the next sync or such. But the server should have a hard time telling if one of these instances is in private browsing mode. There are also UX reason why users may not want the websites that they are visiting in private mode know that fact.

From a pure technical standpoint, there are a few weak spots in the platform that make it impossible to block this effectively. Also, over the years, it has become more difficult to fix everything in the platform according to this rule. At the present, this is probably a lost cause in practice.

Session isolation

From a user's standpoint, their private session with a website is done when they close their private window. In order to support this, we clear our in-memory caches containing details about the sites that the user has visited when the last private window is closed. The reason behind the last part is the technical feasibility of this.

FAQ

• Is network level privacy a goal? Should private browsing use an anonymizing proxy?
  • Experience suggests that users perceive some amount of network level privacy, but from a technical standpoint, that is a challenging problem of its own, so we have decided to not tackle it for now. It may make sense to look into doing this, but there are also reasons why that would be a bad idea.

• Does this mean no network level privacy feature should ever be included?!
  • No. Again, we know that users expect that, so it would be valuable to try to do better in that space.

• What about add-ons?
  • At a technical level, because of the extensive access that add-ons have to our internal APIs, and because they are non-sandboxed, there is nothing that we can do. However, where appropriate, we have been trying to make it easier to use our APIs in a way that does the right thing by default, in order to address some of the issue. On the policy side, we have modified the AMO add-on review guidelines to require add-ons to adhere to our guidelines for supporting private browsing mode.

• Can my feature be exempted from adhering to private browsing?
  • Probably not, but if you think you can make a case for it, that needs to be discussed. Otherwise, it is appreciated if you consider private browsing when designing and implementing your features!