On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 6:37 PM, Jonas Sicking <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Ehsan, > > I'd really like to get some clarity in what the purpose of the private > browsing feature is supposed to be. Last we talked about this the > answer seemed to be "it's different things to different people. Only > thing that we agree on is that a private browsing window should not > write data to the user's disk". > To make it more clear, there is no contention on what the feature should do from our side. It's just that we haven't done a very good job teaching what this feature is intended to do to the _users_. There are for example unintended use cases that came up after the feature was first implemented, such as using this feature to login to the same website twice at the same time (by essentially getting a separate cookie jar) but those are well understood now. But developers are also users, and as a result, developers who are not familiar with private browsing may also have assumptions formed as users of the feature which may not accurately reflect what the feature does. Perhaps this is an example of what you had in mind? There is also cases where deciding how to handle something is difficult. For example, we store newly created bookmarks in private windows to the disk as an unvisited bookmark. That is a choice that we made because we considered bookmarking an explicit action by the user to ask the browser to remember something, but an argument can be constructed for not doing that. While these decisions may sound arbitrary, they were made carefully with context that may not be super obvious. There is also work under way now in order to integrate tracking protection with private browsing, which would mean there would be new decisions like this to be made. I have already started to talk to people about this. > This doesn't seem like a good state of things given how privacy is one > of the main focus areas for Firefox, and private browsing is our main > feature in the privacy space. > > So I think it's quite critical that we figure out what we want this > feature to be on a user level, and not just on a code level. > As far as I'm aware, we (as in me and Josh!) have a pretty clear picture of what we want this feature to be. If you're aware of other parts of Mozilla where there are misunderstanding about this, I would be glad to talk to people and see how I can help. Cheers, Ehsan > > > On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 6:43 AM, Ehsan Akhgari <[email protected]> > wrote: > > The Private Browsing module started its life under the Firefox module > > <https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Modules/Firefox&oldid=351420> > and > > then was unintentionally killed when we merged all of the modules under > > Firefox. > > > > Since Private Browsing currently serves all of our products and as > > experience has shown, it is tough to get it right all the time, I would > like > > to resurrect the module officially under Core this time. > > > > This module is special in the sense that its implementation is spread > across > > the code base because of the nature of the feature. > > > > Here is the details for the resurrected module: > > > > Name: Private Browsing > > Description: Implementation of the Private Browsing mode, and the > > integration of other modules with Private Browsing APIs. > > Owner: Ehsan Akhgari > > Peer(s): Josh Matthews > > Source Dir(s): Implementation and consumers of Private Browsing APIs in > > nsILoadContext, nsIPrivateBrowsingChannel, PrivateBrowsingUtils.jsm and > the > > related glue code. > > Bugzilla Component(s): Firefox::Private Browsing > > URL(s): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Per-window_Private_Browsing > > Discussion Group: mozilla.dev.platform > > _______________________________________________ > > governance mailing list > > [email protected] > > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance > -- Ehsan _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
