When someone asks you to lend your phone in case of emergencies, you cannot just hand them over the phone for the privacy reasons. They can see through all of your mobile activity which is not something that you would want. This is why the new versions of Android (newer than KitKat) have a multi-user mode that you can easily enable in your phone. Even if you do not want to enable the multi-user mode in Android, you can choose to use the guest mode in the Firefox browser for Android before letting anyone use your web browser for the sake of privacy. This way the person using the browser won’t be able to see any of your personal data like the bookmarks, browsing history and so on. Here is how:
- Open Firefox web browser in your Android web browser.
- Touch the menu key on your phone to make it show the context-menu for the web browser.
- Select Tools → New Guest Session from this context-menu to close the current instances of Firefox and launch it in the guest mode.
- When you are done using the Firefox browser in the guest mode, then you can pull down the notification bar and touch on the Firefox Guest mode switch to turn it off. Alternatively, you can also select Tools → Exit Guest Session from the Firefox context-menu to close the guest session.
The guest session for the Firefox web browser for Android does not store any of the data like the browsing history, cache and cookies. Moreover, the person using the Firefox in the guest session won’t be able to see any of your personal data like the sites you have visited, browser history, bookmarks, saved logins and such. Guest session is ideal if someone asks you to lend them your phone for quickly checking something like the email messages or some other information.