Hi, reading through safaris documentation I found the very interesting feature that Safari, at least on iOS, on its private mode uses isolated and ephemeral tabs. Does anyone know if any other browser on iOS or even desktop does this? In my short testing I have found that at least on iOS not even Brave does this.
Am I crazy for thinking this would be an amazing privacy feature for every browser?
I have no knowledge about iOS/Safari, or the features you’ve mentioned specifically. From the names, it sounds like both Firefox and Brave have similar features, and they are not restricted to private browsing mode. Could you explain in a bit more detail what these features are?
On desktop both Firefox (and its derivatives) and Brave have comparable sounding features. Firefox has Dynamic First Party Isolation (dFPI) and Total Cookie Protection and Brave has Ephemeral Site Storage and Forgetful Browsing. Additionally Firefox has the concept of ‘containers’ and the official extension ‘Multi-Account-Containers’ which enables more complete isolation of tabs/groups of tabs and the cookie auto-delete extension provides similar functionality to Forgetful Browsing.
Safari in MacOS has the same. I like it a lot.
@xe3 I believe these are different things. The isolated and ephemeral tabs mean that the browsing context (history, storage, cookies…) are specific for each tab. Meaning that if you log in to a site in a tab, when you open a new tab and enter that site, you are not logged in in that tab. Even in the same browser window. And when you close a tab, all that context goes away. Basically each tab acts like a completely separate incognito mode browser.
Thanks for the explanation. It sounds seomewhat similar to Firefox’s concept of containers + Brave’s forgetful browsing mode.
I don’t really use Private Browsing mode often, so I haven’t really looked into how it works in Firefox or Chromium. But this is now on my list of things to look into at some point.
I believe that Firefox’s default approach (broadly) is to isolate things like cookies on a per domain basis as opposed to a per tab basis. Which has its pros and cons, but is arguably a more sensible and convenient default for most typical use-cases. Though in the context of private browser mode, I see the appeal of per tab isolation, and I especially like the concept of automatically clearing data as soon as a tab is closed (in the context of PB mode). I was looking into using temporary/disposable containers for this in the past.
Yes I was talking exactly about this. It is a very interesting feature, but i havent found any browser on iOS or Desktop that can do anything similar to it, with that level of convenience.
I’m still using Temporary Containers for my normal browsing profile. Still works really well.