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Igor_Kavinski
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How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Tue Mar 03, 2020 3:20 pm

I just switched to Firefox's Private browsing mode in lieu of Chrome's Incognito mode and am very pleased to see that it is extremely frugal with ram usage. However, while saving, I accidentally clicked "E-mail image" and then it reported some error and now the entire Private browsing window isn't responding to clicks on the other open tabs or the new tab button or anything else. I can still browse in that one tab but I can't switch to any of the other tabs and there are more than 50 open that I would like to save and not lose my hard work. Any idea how to access the disk cache for the private browsing mode? Or maybe some way to break Firefox out of whatever it seems to be waiting for? I can open another private browsing window and it works just fine. I also tried closing the Firefox process associated with the troublesome tab but it only causes the web page in it to disappear and does not actually close that tab. Help!

Update: My laptop froze and had to restart, thus losing the unsaved tabs. Still, any ideas are welcome to salvage whatever I can if this happens in future (wish they would remove that email pics option from the right click menu or give us the option to disable it. Who emails pics anymore???)
 
meerkt
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Wed Mar 04, 2020 12:40 pm

Don't know. Maybe a separate sessionstore.js for private mode? Unless it's not saved to disk.

It's sad that browsers do poorly when it comes to retaining the user state. And it's not a difficult problem.
I recently lost the session in Vivaldi. No crash. Just no tabs on the next start.

The following can auto-save periodically:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... n-manager/
 
Waco
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Wed Mar 04, 2020 12:57 pm

The whole point of private/incognito browsing is to leave essentially no footprint behind. By nature, that means it's not going to be tracking state for recovery after a crash/shutdown.

If it's that important to recover state, don't use private browsing modes.
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Igor_Kavinski
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Wed Mar 04, 2020 1:44 pm

meerkt wrote:
It's sad that browsers do poorly when it comes to retaining the user state. And it's not a difficult problem.


Yep. It's like the developers are clueless about why some people would have hundreds of tabs open. If there is a crash, whether in normal or private browsing mode, give the user the option to at the very least, save the URLs of all the open tabs so they don't lose hours and hours of browsing. Guess this isn't gonna get fixed unless a developer himself faces this issue.
 
meerkt
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Wed Mar 04, 2020 1:58 pm

Waco wrote:
The whole point of private/incognito browsing is to leave essentially no footprint behind.

Might be true. Though a crash isn't the same as cleanly ending a session.

And though I haven't researched this, I wouldn't be surprised if private modes do touch disk.
 
just brew it!
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Wed Mar 04, 2020 2:06 pm

As Waco just pointed out, the whole POINT of Private mode is to not leave any persistent state. If there was persistent state, that would be a bug!

Normally you would just force-kill the browser and use the "restore previously open tabs" option on restart. At least, that's how it would work in Chrome... not sure about FF. But even then, it only works for non-private/incognito windows.

By using Private mode you've reduced the odds of recovering the session to near zero.

meerkt wrote:
Might be true. Though a crash isn't the same as cleanly ending a session.

And though I haven't researched this, I wouldn't be surprised if private modes do touch disk.

Aside from incidental swap file usage, I would say that's a bug if it is happening.
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Waco
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Wed Mar 04, 2020 2:29 pm

meerkt wrote:
Waco wrote:
The whole point of private/incognito browsing is to leave essentially no footprint behind.

And though I haven't researched this, I wouldn't be surprised if private modes do touch disk.

That would be a staggering programming/design mistake if so. I could see swap usage under memory pressure, but nothing hitting persistent disk in any form.

Edit: jbi beat me to it. Lol
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Igor_Kavinski
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Wed Mar 04, 2020 3:17 pm

Waco wrote:
I could see swap usage under memory pressure, but nothing hitting persistent disk in any form.


Is that why Chrome incognito mode uses ram like there's no tomorrow? But then how does Firefox keep ram usage low in its Private browsing mode? Right now, 60+ tabs in Chrome normal mode are consuming around 1.2 GB. If I open just ONE page in incognito mode, after a while, I will be looking at 4+ GB of ram consumed. Also, it seems Firefox and Chrome tab memory management are worlds apart. Chrome seems to allocate one process per tab whereas Firefox seems to need no more than 11 processes for 30+ tabs open in Private browsing mode.
 
Waco
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Wed Mar 04, 2020 3:26 pm

They're structured differently. Firefox, at least in my experience, is far more likely to explode catastrophically if one tab decides to misbehave. Chrome sandboxes each tab so that a dead tab won't kill the others.

The startup cost for a Chrome private tab is fairly high for the first one, and lower for more beyond that first one (since they do share a lot of read-only structures/libraries). But yes, the high RAM usage is because it can't cache anything to disk. The more media-heavy sites you visit simultaneously, the higher that cost is. Also, remember, unused RAM is wasted RAM. It's not a sin for your primary foreground application to use as much as possible.
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Igor_Kavinski
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Wed Mar 04, 2020 4:27 pm

I don't know which behavior is more undesirable, Chrome's memory hogging or a single Firefox tab's tendency to make other adjacent tabs inaccessible. Any browser suggestion that circumvents both these problems yet does not introduce some other equally annoying quirk?
 
Waco
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Wed Mar 04, 2020 4:29 pm

To be perfectly honest, I've never found Chrome's memory usage to be a problem. It ramps back under memory pressure pretty nicely to the point where I've never been concerned about it - that experience holds true on a 4 GB crappy EeePC through my desktop with 32 GB.
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Igor_Kavinski
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Wed Mar 04, 2020 6:22 pm

Waco wrote:
To be perfectly honest, I've never found Chrome's memory usage to be a problem. It ramps back under memory pressure pretty nicely to the point where I've never been concerned about it - that experience holds true on a 4 GB crappy EeePC through my desktop with 32 GB.

That's probably coz your tab usage patterns are more "sane". I need tabs open to remind me of things that need doing in the near future. I can't trust myself to make a list of things to do and then keep checking them over and over to see what's left to do. Somehow, tons of open tabs let me organize. Only problem is, there are tabs that I know I won't need open indefinitely so I open them in private mode which leads to 6 GB or more of ram usage and then some low memory crash. Also, I would prefer to close them myself rather than some crash or bug making them go away all at once, leaving me with the feeling that maybe I lost something important just coz I didn't get the time to look it over properly. I know this all sounds weird but that's a unique problem I have.
 
just brew it!
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Thu Mar 05, 2020 7:56 am

Yeah, sounds like you have an outlier use case there. Seems to me your choices are to either A) find a different way of organizing your life that doesn't require having a browser tab open for every item on your "to do" list; or B) ditch the use of Private mode for anything where there isn't a pressing security/privacy reason for using it, so you at least have a chance of recovering the tabs after killing the browser.

Also, have you considered using bookmarks instead of leaving tabs open?
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JustAnEngineer
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Thu Mar 05, 2020 8:15 am

just brew it! wrote:
Also, have you considered using bookmarks instead of leaving tabs open?
Ding! Ding! Ding!

There are lots of apps for organizing to-do lists, reminders and goals. I suggest finding one that lets you apply the Franklin-Covey method (even without using the paper-and-pen Franklin planner).
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Igor_Kavinski
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Thu Mar 05, 2020 10:49 am

just brew it! wrote:
Also, have you considered using bookmarks instead of leaving tabs open?


Bookmarks aren't as "visual" as open tabs. I have to click the bookmark to open it and I have to click it once before to save it. Then I will have to delete the bookmark afterwards as those tabs aren't really something I want to return to at some other point in the future. I just got an idea though. I will search a bit about it and share if it turns out to be feasible.
 
just brew it!
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Thu Mar 05, 2020 1:37 pm

In that case, I recommend hand-written Post-It notes stuck to the wall. Doesn't get much more visual than that. You can even get different colors to help you organize your todo items.
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Redocbew
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Thu Mar 05, 2020 1:43 pm

I've been meaning to check out Trello boards. I have a client who uses them, and it seems like a better solution than having random sheets of paper laying around filled with my geek-scrawl.
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meerkt
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Re: How to access Firefox private browsing disk cache

Thu Mar 05, 2020 2:54 pm

I watched Vivaldi's private mode for a while. Indeed it doesn't persist file data. As expected, perhaps, but I still found it a bit surprising.

It does occasionally touch the files "Network Persistent State", "Local State", and "Preferences", but no private-mode related stuff in there, I think. But I noticed it sometimes creates a randomly named file, then immediately deletes it. Didn't investigate further.

Anyway, surprising because browsers tend to be data hoarders.

For example, the "Preferences" file, a Chromium legacy, also holds a whole bunch of per-site data which can't be cleared from the GUI. Perhaps not sites visited under private-mode, but still, I have thousands of URLs there, keeping track of important stats such as "media_engagement". There's also "per_host_zoom_level" (corresponds to chrome://settings/content/zoomLevels).

The other day I was cleaning up Vivaldi's profile/junkyard directory. Even excluding the cache directory, it was 100s of MBs and 10Ks of files to delete.

To-do list software: a recent topic.

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