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How do I permanately turn off the option of Private Browsing? I don't want my children to surf the internet and hide websites they access?

  • 3 replies
  • 9 have this problem
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  • Last reply by alan_r

shellz
shellz
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I do not want my children to be able to access the internet and hide all history of websites they access. How can I permanently disable the Private Browsing option on Firefox? I don't want them to ever have the option of turning this feature on.

I do not want my children to be able to access the internet and hide all history of websites they access. How can I permanently disable the Private Browsing option on Firefox? I don't want them to ever have the option of turning this feature on.

All Replies (3)

the-edmeister
the-edmeister
  • Moderator
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Sorry. Private Browsing can't be disabled. The most that can be done is to hide the menu items for it with the proper code, but the keyboard command would still turn it on and browsing history can still be cleared manually.

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 10 Contributor
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I'm not sure there is an official supported solution for this. What usually is recommended is to use separate parental monitoring software. E.g., Parental controls | How to | Firefox Help and Parental controls - MozillaZine Knowledge Base and PCMag - Parental Control & Monitoring - Products.

The following thread describes two other options: permanently disable private browsing | Firefox Support Forum | Firefox Help. The first (editing menus) is specific to the Firefox profile you edit. It would not affect other Firefox profiles or Safe Mode. The second (removing a program file) could be "repaired" by reinstalling the browser. So if someone is very determined, they can work around those changes.

alan_r
alan_r
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You might like to look at this recent answer to the same question with entries by myself, The ed-meister and cor-el. The short answer is that turning off your operating system with a password and supervision seem to be the only answers.

https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/827537

Children of moderate ability can install and uninstall a new browser in no time flat. And can certainly delete individual history items, cookies, cache entries. I've heard a router suggestion but I don't know if the router lists can be doctored. Also, as I noted, you can do anything with a USB stick these days.