Firefox Privacy & Customization Shortcuts

Opening a new Private Window (Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows/Linux, Cmd+Shift+P on Mac) spins up a fresh Private Browsing session that discards its history, cookies, and any typed form data the moment the window closes. Firefox binds this specifically to P rather than Chrome's N (for New incognito window), which is one of the most common small frictions for anyone who regularly switches between both browsers, since the same muscle-memory keystroke does something entirely different — or nothing recognizable at all — depending on which browser currently has focus. Container tabs address a genuinely different problem than Private Browsing does, and understanding the distinction is worth being precise about. A container tab isolates cookies and site data into a separate, named context, letting you stay simultaneously logged into two different accounts on the same website — a work account and a personal account, for instance — in separate tabs without either session interfering with the other. Unlike Private Browsing, which discards everything the moment it closes, containers keep a genuinely persistent, separately logged-in session you can close and return to later exactly as you left it. There's no single default global keyboard shortcut for opening a new container tab; it's reached through the container icon in the toolbar (visible once you've enabled and configured at least one container), where selecting a specific container opens a new tab scoped to it. The about:config page, reached by typing it directly into the address bar and pressing Enter, is Firefox's low-level configuration editor — not a keyboard shortcut in the traditional sense, but the typed gateway to Firefox's deepest layer of user-exposed customization, including preferences related to keyboard shortcut behavior and privacy settings that aren't surfaced anywhere in the regular Settings UI at all. This page carries a genuine warning on entry precisely because it exposes internal preferences that can meaningfully affect stability or security if changed carelessly, which is part of why Firefox gates it behind an explicit "I accept the risk" click rather than making it as casually reachable as the regular Settings page. Clearing recent history (Ctrl+Shift+Delete / Cmd+Shift+Delete) opens a dialog offering genuinely granular control — a specific time range (the last hour, today, or everything) combined with a choice of exactly which data types to remove (cookies, cache, browsing history, saved form data, and more), rather than an indiscriminate clear-everything action. This granularity matters for anyone who wants to clear, say, just today's browsing history while deliberately preserving saved logins or longer-term cache. Enhanced Tracking Protection's status panel, opened by clicking the shield icon that appears in the address bar (no default global keyboard shortcut), shows exactly what Firefox has blocked on the current page — trackers, cross-site cookies, fingerprinting scripts — and lets you adjust protection strictness for that specific site individually if a particular site is breaking because something it needs is being blocked. This built-in, on-by-default tracking protection is a meaningful part of Firefox's broader privacy-by-default positioning relative to Chromium-based browsers, most of which have historically required a separate extension to achieve comparable blocking. Taken together, this category reflects Firefox's core differentiator most directly: not raw speed or a larger extension catalog, but a genuinely deeper layer of user control over privacy and customization than the mainstream Chromium-based alternatives typically expose by default, for users who specifically value having that control available even if they don't touch about:config or configure a container on day one.