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Et Tu, Mozilla? Firefox 3 To Get Privacy Mode
CWmike writes "Mozilla will respond to Google's Chrome and Microsoft's IE8 with its own private-browsing, or 'porn' mode in Firefox, according to notes posted on its Web site, and is on track to deliver one in 3.1, the version that will likely go beta next month."
Safari has had a private/pr0n browsing mode for 3+ years...
firefox has had plugins for this for some time, they just weren't there by default.
True.
First page I found in Google:
http://lifehacker.com/software/privacy/download-of-the-day-stealther-firefox-extension-174752.php
When you have a good extension system, not everything needs to be incorporated anymore. Like an Adblocker...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Uh, I know CWmike wants to promote Computerworld and all, but really a link to at least one of the "notes posted on its website" would have also been helpful..
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Dude, Latin, not French.
The privacy mode was included in some alphas of Firefox 3.0. The developers decided to postpone this feature because the release of 3.0 was already delayed.
Actually, aren't most of these features built in already? It's built into the Options -> Privacy tab.
According to the article, "privacy mode" would do the following:
* Discard all cookies acquired during the private session.
* Not record sites visited to the browser's history.
* Not autofill passwords, and not prompt the user to save passwords.
* Remove all downloads done during the session from the browser's download manager.
All of those things can be set on the Privacy tab, in Options. Am I wrong?
direct link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1306
It has 820.000 downloads, so it's not like people have been missing this functionality from firefox...
FireFox/FireBird/Phoenix/FireWhatever has from day one featured an option for scraping any traces (and same for Mozilla and Netscape).
The subtlety is that until now the control was rather coarse (you could either remove most of the traces or leave all of them. You could chose *which traces* : history, cache, cookies, etc. but *not wich tabs* you removed all cookies or all urls etc.).
Whereas now you can fine tune for only some tabs.
(although cookies could be changed from permanent to session-only for specific URLs)
On the other hand, I was under the impression that Inter Explorer until very recently had the capability to only remove some traces (it was possible to purge the cache with a simple button click, but not all other forms of traces). But I haven't been a regular IE user, so I can't reliably assert whether or not IE could scrap all traces.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
All of those things can be set on the Privacy tab, in Options. Am I wrong?
The subtle difference is that since the old NetScape days, the pivacy can only controlled for the whole browser :
You either scrap your whole history or you keep it.
In Chrome, Safari and starting from version 3.1 of FireFox :
one tab could be in private mode (for example not saving any cookie nor cache) while the next tab could be a normal tab with your usual web AJAX application running.
Although I fail to realise who could simultaneously need to be able to fap at some p0rn in one tab while writting TPS reports at the very same time in the next tab.
That's multitasking taken to some really weird proportion.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The Distrust extension for Firefox DOES remove flash cookies, and it sits as a convenient toggle-button in the status-bar.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1559
At least in my opinion, it's a lot nicer to just click a button and browse privately, and then click it again after you're finished than to have to open up a whole new window like in Chrome. I really think the "open new Incognito window" would be more usable if it was an "open new Incognito tab", instead. Although maybe that's just my opinion.
Flashblock - don't let it run in the first place and it can't put cookies on your system.
Actually, Flashblock doesn't prevent flash from running - it just shuts it down quickly, so it doesn't block cookies at all.