I think, often it was more that one didn't want others to know about the history of those activities, which is not the same thing as not wanting them recorded.
If there had been a safe way to secretly store that history, by having seperate identitie's in Firefox, (with password protection and crypto, etc...), that would've solved that case nicely.
And if you clear that secret, protected identitie's history, we'd have had 'Private Browsing', but also a ton more.
Separate histories and identities has been a feature for a while. Firefox and Chrome (and probably others) have profiles (though I don't think Firefox had an easy way to switch).
This is different. Cookies and storage are separated, but history, bookmarks, passwords etc. are shared [1]
If there had been a safe way to secretly store that history, by having seperate identitie's in Firefox, (with password protection and crypto, etc...), that would've solved that case nicely.
And if you clear that secret, protected identitie's history, we'd have had 'Private Browsing', but also a ton more.
Which we're about to get now, it seems.