hello, if you don't want other people to have a look at the contents of your phone then it's best to set a pass-phrase or unlock-gesture at the system level. firefox for android also has a guest browsing mode (in menu > extras) if you want to hand it to a friend temporarily.

Hi arminius1!

Philipp is absolutely correct (thanks Philipp)! Better to use Android security and guest browsing.

However we hear you about disabling top sites and hope to ship that in Firefox for Android 29 which is currently scheduled for April 29, 2014

This wiki page has more info on this disabling top sites feature:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Projects/My_List:_Manage_current_lists_in_settings

Cheers!

...Roland

The good news is the proposed ability to remove home page tabs. That'd be great.

The workaround is not really helpful. I could also just not use a phone at all and that would 'solve' the problem. A better workaround is to just not use Firefox because Chrome deletes your recent sites when you clear your history. Firefox is nothing short of deceptive because when you 'clear browsing history' it keeps your browsing history. In what way is that 'clearing'? (rhetorical question)

Hi again arminus1:

I always think it's fair to think of people and organizations to be innocent until proven guilty. We are as we have always been working on the side of the user as per our manifesto:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

so I would appreciate you giving us a wee bit more the benefit of the doubt especially since there are no documented cases of Mozilla handing over date to governments or compromising user data. 

Firefox *does* clear your bookmarks, top sites and history when you clear browsing history. I am aware of the following issues:

1. If you have a site pinned in your Top Sites, Firefox doesn't unpin pinned Top Sites when you clear history. Pinning a site is a hard feature to discover so I doubt this is your problem. If you have pinned a site, long tap on it in Top Sites to unpin it. This seems like a bug to me. Feel free to file a bug about this at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi
2. If for some reason you have Don't keep activities checked in: Android Settings | Developer options then clearing history doesn't work in Firefox for Android. Not sure if this is an Android Operating system bug or a Firefox bug. To fix this issue, simply uncheck "Don't keep activities" and then clearing history in Firefox will work properly. I believe we already have a bug filed about this but there's not much we can do about Android OS. I believe it's a bug to expose this to users. I have personally tested clearing private data and it works fine for me on my Galaxy Note 3 and Nexus 5, 7 and 10.
3. Finally if there's some other issue around clearing history or private data, i would love to hear it and feel free to file a bug or I will file a bug for you

Cheers!

...Roland

Hi all:

We now have documentation on how to disable top sites or any other tab on your home screen:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-awesome-screen-search-web-bookmarks-and-more#w_customize-your-home-screen

Locking this question since I think this answers it!

Cheers!

...Roland