Affirmative: Leave no trace with Firefox Private Browsing

Posted by Vivek ||

November 5, 2008 ||

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We have seen the concept of private browsing being talked about a lot in recent times. There are a lot of instances where private browsing makes sense. However, there are instances where it’s purpose is defeated. The classic example of this situation would be in an organization where the companies keep a track of employees browsing habit by implementing packet level analysis. The question of whether this is right or not will end up in a long debate with out any conclusions.

However, this whole concept of private browsing adds a new dimension to Internet browsing. After all Internet is for Porn. Going by this philosophy, Internet explorer had already launched InPrivate mode in it’s popular version of Internet Explorer 8 beta 2. Google’s famous browser Chrome has this feature by the name of Incognito Mode. However, Firefox has been holding it’s card close to the chest when it comes to this feature.

But no more! With Firefox reaching close to capturing 20% of browser market share, it has announced that the next version of Firefox, i.e. Firefox 3.1 will come with the famous private browsing mode. We at TNerd managed to test the nightly build of Firefox to check the much awaited Private browsing mode. The philosophy of private browsing mode is that nothing will be recorded during that session of your browsing and hence you won’t leave any traces of your browsing history including cookie data.

Getting on the private browsing mode in Firefox 3.1 is very simple. Just go to:

Tools->Private Browsing

This will pop up a small alert window like the one below which says that Firefox will save your current session before starting the private browsing mode.

After this your private browsing session will start with a message which tells you about private browsing.

his looks very similar to the features in Internet Explorer beta 2 and Google Chrome. However, it would be very interesting to see how Firefox separates itself from the league. One way could be to provide custom private browsing mode. Let’s say there’s a link on the page and right clicking it should give an option to open that link in private mode while working on the other tabs in normal mode. Drop in your comments to let us know how would you like to see this feature of Firefox extended.