Firefox Plans for Easy Reset of Private Browsing Sessions

Private browsing is a must-have feature for those who value online privacy. It ensures that your browsing history remains a well-kept secret and that data such as cookies and site-specific information don’t remain in your system.

However, there’s always been a small inconvenience – if you wanted to reset your private session, you had to close all private browsing windows and start anew. Well, not anymore!

The development version of Firefox, called Nightly, landed a new feature to reset your private browsing by clicking of a toolbar button.

The button shows as a “flame” icon, currently in active development, is positioned in the Firefox main toolbar when you’re in private browsing mode.

Once clicked, the flame icon displays a clear and concise message: “End your private session.” Clicking on it initiates the reset. It’s like closing all private tabs and opening a fresh private browsing window in one swift motion. Worried about accidentally resetting your session? Fear not; there’s a cancel button for that.

But here’s where it gets even more interesting. Firefox is also adding an option to uncheck the “always ask me” box. If you disable this option, the reset happens instantly, saving you precious seconds.

Now, the burning question is when can we expect this feature to hit the stable version of Firefox? While we can’t provide an exact date, it’s worth noting that the earliest opportunity would be with Firefox 120 Stable. If all goes well, we could see this game-changing feature arriving by the end of November 2023.

You can also enable or disable it using the preference option ‘browser.privatebrowsing.resetPBM.enabled‘ to show/hide the flame icon in the toolbar.

You can download Firefox nightly from this page, if you want to try it out before it lands in the main stable.

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