..."Firefox profiles" fixed it very well. Same as Chrome profiles: I have one for my work persona, one for my personal persona, another for my sysadmin persona, and 3 others for... er... nevermind. But it works great.
Besides, 11 FAQ and a long blog post: I'm not sure they narrowed down the most focussed feature that would provide the most value and be used by the most number of users.
Yeah, but afaik, switching those profiles in Firefox is (currently) really difficult. So much so that it almost feels the same as if you didn't have the capability to do it...
You can edit your shortcut or .desktop file to open "firefox -P" instead of "firefox". Each time you click it, it will ask which profile you want the new window to be in.
Had I known this earlier... I had the same reaction as the person you replied to, I hadn't thought of using profiles. I knew something called profiles existed, but I thought it was not in use anymore (at least not properly supported). I never connected the dots.
Still sounds like a pain to manage though, compared to this new feature.
Yeah it's not a great user interface, and it's definitely buried. Aside from the Developer Edition which uses a different profile by default, it seems to be ignored by Firefox devs. Probably because they don't want to support all the people who get confused by the terrible UI!
I think, often it was more that one didn't want others to know about the history of those activities, which is not the same thing as not wanting them recorded.
If there had been a safe way to secretly store that history, by having seperate identitie's in Firefox, (with password protection and crypto, etc...), that would've solved that case nicely.
And if you clear that secret, protected identitie's history, we'd have had 'Private Browsing', but also a ton more.
Separate histories and identities has been a feature for a while. Firefox and Chrome (and probably others) have profiles (though I don't think Firefox had an easy way to switch).
This is different. Cookies and storage are separated, but history, bookmarks, passwords etc. are shared [1]
I think this is the actual solution to the problem that 'private browsing' was trying to fix when it first came out.