Tails

One of the rare things that prevent me from using Tails for my regular browsing is the lack of an option for persistent browser history, and session state (opened tabs).

When history is enabled, it is saved is places.sqlite, that can be made persistent with our “bookmarks” persistence preset. How to disentangle history and bookmarks in the persistence configuration UI is left as an exercise to the reader.

Session state is stored in sessionstore.js, so that should be the easy part. It probably depends on the history being writable (if not outright persistent), so let’s not treat this as a separate feature.

Enabling history can be done with a few Firefox prefs (hint: extensions.torbutton.block_disk, browser.privatebrowsing.autostart, probably more). So we have two problems here:

• Finding the minimum set of required prefs.
• Making sure the required lines are in user.js, whenever this preset is enabled. It certainly can be done with some hack in live-persist, but perhaps we can find a less hackish solution.