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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."
What's wrong with a little realism? Viewing porn is one of the major uses of a web browser, thus such a facility is practically a no-brainer.
Safari has had a private/pr0n browsing mode for 3+ years...
Well what have I been using all this time then?
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.
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.
I already know how to hide pr0n from the missus, I just need you to get it to me *FASTER*!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"However, it was yanked several months ago during Version 3.0's development."
Shouldn't this be called default mode?
By default I put my snail mail in envelopes (keep my correspondence private), by default I put on clothes (keep my privates... private), and by default I expect the police are not searching my house or tapping my phone (4th Amendment privacy). Why isn't my browser private by defa.... oh wait, it's not my browser, it belongs to MS Google Mozilla, nevermind.
Mozilla follows Microsoft's lead.
(takes wagers on how this gets modded)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I can think of LOTS of other uses. For instance..
um...
ah, no wait, I've almost got it....
um........
Ok, I'll get back to you on this one.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
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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Lets face it. Pornography has been around since the dawn of the internet and in all that time not one browser, newsreader or email client ever offered a "privacy mode" until recently. We're talking since BBS days here. Yes there are some people who would like to spin, or frame, these features as "porn mode". But this is a fairly transparent attempt to discredit what is an important, appropriate and yes disruptive new innovation.
And what has spurred this innovation? What necessity has been the mother of this invention? Porn? No. Thing far more unsettling than that. Phishers, fraudsters, malware have all played their part. People need more protection nowadays. But most of the reasons for privacy features can be summed up in one word.
Marketers.
Modern marketers are utterly relentless, completely amoral and without any scruple whatsoever. They are are with enormous databases, and the desire to fill them with as much data as they can lay their hands on. Tracking users and their habits online, and assaulting them with advertisements based on that data has become an industry in itself. Every social networking website, every online newspaper, every site that has any ability to track its users whatsoever is piping that data straight to an eager marketing department which presumably has some method concocted to throw ads back at users who would rather be left alone.
This is international information collection on an unprecedented scale in human history. To be sure, as of now this is only a practice of private enterprise, the current databases are disorganized and incompatible. But this is a new industry, essentially only a decade or so old. What will happen when its methods, theories and processes standardize? How dangerous will those databases be then?
Google is not blameless in this either. Remember that the company makes its money not on searches, but on advertisements that it offers on its search pages and on other sites. That company is tracking probably the majority of web user by now, and any site that you go to that is affiliated with Google (this includes Slashdot), dutifully makes sure that your presence their and what you are doing is made known to Seattle, so that they may better know your habits. You think they'll just sit on all that juicy marketing data till the end of time and forever "Do No Evil"? Get real. They are a private company and will do whatever they like as long as it is legal. Watch it happen.
So go ahead, call it a "porn" feature, but the reality is that those browsing for porn will probably not even bother to turn it on. It will only be used by those who understand just how dangerous so much personal data in private hands can be.
Make no mistake, this is a disruptive technology. Marketers will not like it. Webmasters will not like it. Google will not like it. So expect substantial mudslinging surrounding this issue in the months to come.
May the Maths Be with you!
Pr0n mode can kill free pr0n in theory.
Pretty much every single free porn site on the Internet makes money via affiliate programs. They offer free content in an attempt to sell you a membership to the pay site that the content comes from. The way the affiliate clicks are tracked is via cookies. If every web browser has an easy way to toggle cookie-saving while browsing porn then free porn sites could end up losing a ton of money. They'll go under if such browsing practices become the norm and affiliate programs can't figure out a better way to track than cookies. And avoiding tracking is one of the obvious purposes here.
So a tip to surfers. If you have absolutely no intention of purchasing a pay-site membership ever then leave the cookies off and don't sweat it. But if you purchase porn at all then you're not doing your favourite free site(s) any service by browsing with cookies off.
Dude, Latin, not French.
What I would personally like is to be able to add certain sites to a password-protected "privacy list", so that visits to those sites would be stealthed, while visits to other sites would not. I don't want to have to start a special private session, which seems like a pretty lame way to do it. Mozilla should have looked at how to improve this feature by adding something like that, for example. Unfortunately it looks like Mozilla are just implementing the same thing as IE and Chrome, instead of looking to improve on it.
Oh no... it's the future.
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.
Specifically, the mode would:
* 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.
These are good web surfing practices to begin with. These seem more like bug fixes to me. Why not make them the default? Why would I ever want to browse without these safeguards?
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...
Absolutely. I've used Stealther for a long while. It's the first thing I download (followed by NoScript) and... Well... I don't see a reason to incorporate that to FF. It's quick to get it and easy to find for anyone who wishes to have such... It works just like the extensions are supposed to work in FF!
(That said, the stealther should get some bug fixes. It doesn't remove whole history but if visiting example.com and example2.com before putting it on, then visiting example2.com and example3.com and turning it off again, example 2 has been removed from history, etc.)
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?
Simply a case of competition driving another cycle of improvement. Those people who like to claim there's no reason for open source developers to improve and innovate often forget that your basic human being is a competitive critter at heart.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
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...
The point of the privacy option is it makes it much easier to keep useful things like cookes and history for your day to day browsing while also allowing you to surf anonymously for your "private sites".
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 ]
With IE8 having the functionality to log keystrokes and send those back home the level of privacy is debatable.
From the IE8 Privacy statement, that almost no one will go though the trouble of reading:
"When Suggested Sites is turned on, the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with some standard information from your computer such as IP address, browser type, regional and language settings,"
One of these things, is not like the other.
The AC is a troll, but link to Privoxy is relevant and informative.
I'd love to post a reply to this, but am too busy watching porn!
I will not be convinced of browser privacy modes to be fully effective until browsers decide to also have that carried over into the flash realm. I have confirmed that even in Safari's private mode; flash ads and programs still set cookies, and they are not erased when the session is closed like everything else. I find it also more frustrating that because it is flash; this cookie information goes across browsers since it is stored outside the realm of the browser. For the record i also find it frustrating and convoluted on how one must actually go to some web site on adobe.com to remove flash data like that.
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 ]
3m privacy film on you laptop/LCD? works great for me at work. they need to get very close to you to see what you are doing.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
820 isn't that many, it could be one person downloading it obsessively, even. I assume your using US numeric notation because you used a en-US link.
lol: You see no door there!
You can disable the "disable cookies" option in the settings, leaving all other option available then Stealther is active. I also tried adding the functionality of having a "temporary cookie store" but things got messy, so I kept the current functionality, upgrading the add-on mostly only to keep up with the Firefox releases. Looks like it will soon be obsolete anyway, so thanks to everyone for using it ;) /author
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.
(although cookies could be changed from permanent to session-only for specific URLs)
So reddit or many other sites, for example, keeps asking if you are over 18 and won't allow you past until you allow it to set a cookie. With a sandboxed approach, the site can set the cookie to its hearts content and you, the user, know that the sandbox will be wiped clean when you close the browser/tab.
Congratulation, you successfully described a "session" cookie.
BTW that's my default type of cookies (Setting : "consider all cookies as session cookies". Then only put exception to the couple of website where I really need cookies carying data from one session to another).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Back in the days of Firefox 2, you could surf with no worries. All you had to do was avoid typing the porn site into the address bar, and you left no noticeable traces. This meant that bookmarks and links (think search results) left virtually no traces.
If you screwed-up, you could easily erase your browsing history. If you were really paranoid, you could turn off cookies while you browsed as well.
Then, along came Firefox 3 with the Awfulbar(TM). Suddenly, your entire web access history plus bookmarks were laid bare, and suddenly there was a need for a privacy mode. I've personally managed to get around the whole annoyance by using "show only typed" with Oldbar (behaves like Firefox 2), but for most general users this is far too complicated.
Of course, they could just make us all entirely happy by removing the Awfulbar(TM), but I'm not expecting miracles.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Average Joe doesn't even know what flash cookies are, let alone how to turn them off, but that doesn't matter because Average Jane doesn't know what they are either or where to look for them.
Average Joe's big worry is that Average Jane will go to check her emails and as she types the hot in hotmail, hot-teen-pussy.com comes up in the drop-down box, or worse, hot-twinks.com
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
...that changes the name from "Privacy Mode" to "Porn Viewing Mode". No I'm serious. ;-)
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.