RSSA peek into private browsing in the next Firefox 3.1 beta
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published November 5, 2008, 3:58 PM
It's a race now to be the first to implement an evidence-proofing feature in an RTM of a Web browser. The fellow in charge of making it work for Firefox made his suggestions known over the weekend, and he wants to keep things simple.
It's rare that Mozilla Firefox finds itself in the role of playing catch-up in the feature department. But with a special private mode that suspends the recording of cache and history data already showing up in both Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and even the earliest betas of Google Chrome, the open source developers at Mozilla are stepping on the gas for a feature they've actually considered for several years.
The problem, up to now, has been less of a technical one (intentionally not doing something is pretty easy to program) than one of presentation: How should the browser inform its user that he's browsing the Web in private? As developers have commented in the past, you can't exactly wave a big red flag that screams, "PRIVATE" without attracting attention. On the other hand, something needs to inform the user that his online tracks are being ignored without being so discrete that he can't tell the difference.
In a blog post yesterday, Mozilla contributor Ehsan Akhgari -- who is assigned the Private Browsing project for Firefox -- gave other developers their first peek into his take on the feature. While Chrome (which has yet to see a "final" release) presents a prominent cloak-and-dagger icon to adorn its private browsing windows, the latest nightly build of Firefox 3.1 (not an official public beta) shows a less flashy, more discrete approach: one which may very well not be the one finally adopted.
We tried the nightly build produced early this morning by Mozilla, on an XP Professional SP3-based virtual machine. For now, the system is fairly simple: From the Tools menu, you select Private Browsing. Firefox will remind you that it will save your open tabs before entering Private Browsing (PB) mode, because unlike the case with the current IE8 Beta 2, the private window will not open separately from the non-private one. Rather, your recorded browser session closes and your private one begins, with a little warning telling you that nothing is being saved for posterity.
"Private Browsing aims to help you make sure that your web browsing activities don't leave any trace on your own computer," Ahkgari wrote yesterday. "It is very important to note that Private Browsing is not a tool to keep you anonymous from websites or your ISP, or for example protect you from all kinds of spyware applications which use sophisticated techniques to intercept your online traffic. Private Browsing is only about making sure that Firefox doesn't store any data which can be used to trace your online activities, no more, no less."
While the session lasts, the only indication the user receives that it's private is in the title bar of the window, where the (Private Browsing) warning appears. Earlier, contributors suggested other changes to the front end, such as perhaps replacing the page icon on the title bar or altering its color; but with that icon also serving the purpose of reporting the validity of a signed and authenticated site for an encrypted session, any extra embellishment there could be difficult for users to interpret.
Some contributors still want to see more pizzazz to this feature; but the problem is, the developers are limited by their own self-imposed constraints about the extent of visual changes they'll allow between Firefox 3.0 and 3.1. If the feature changes more than just the appearance but also the functionality of the browser any more than the current nightly build suggests, then private browsing could be postponed altogether -- and in the feature race, Mozilla may not be able to afford further delays.
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| The purpose of private browsing is to cover up any tracks one may otherwise leave for himself -- perhaps when, say, investigating one's co-workers. Here the user has stumbled upon...just by accident, mind you...two "Gunns." I don't think they're related, but now I think I know where Tim gets his sense of style. |
I still prefer Safari - it has this (important) functionality and much better performance
my comments at http://www.commentino.com/orim
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|I guess this is "ok", but it will lull people into a false sense of privacy.
Take the number of people every year who get busted at work for browsing inappropriate content (Pr0n). Most large workplaces store your browsing history on the server that all your traffic passes through so deleting or not saving your history only proves that you knew you were doing something wrong.
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|Exactly my point.
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|I agree with womfalcs7 Mozilla firefox needs to improve on memory usage.
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|You should update to Firefox 3.0
http://dotnetperls.com/Content/Browser-Memory.aspx
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|Well then why didn't you post under his original post? Oh wait, you wanted attention.
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|@prod
I don't really care what a browser is doing over 700 pages, i do care what it's doing over 5-6 tabs i normally use (and firefox is OMG huge there)
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|Good features, but features I won't really use.
I just want performance improvements.
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|"But with a special private mode that suspends the recording of cache and history data already showing up in both Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and even the earliest betas of Google Chrome, the open source developers at Mozilla are stepping on the gas for a feature they've actually considered for several years."
I may be going mad, but hasn't Safari (for Windows and Mac) had this since at least version 3?*
"Firefox will remind you that it will save your open tabs before entering Private Browsing (PB) mode, because unlike the case with the current IE8 Beta 2, the private window will not open separately from the non-private one."
That's completely useless.
*Note for Foxfyre: I'm not commenting on the market share, so don't start.
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|Dang. Thats too bad. I wanted to hear.
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|"Firefox will remind you that it will save your open tabs before entering Private Browsing (PB) mode, because unlike the case with the current IE8 Beta 2, the private window will not open separately from the non-private one."
That's completely useless.
Actually, that's something I hated about Chrome. If i wanted a private tab, it had to be a *new* window. It's a tabbed browser, ffs...requiring multiple windows seems counter-productive.
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|I was suggesting the Firefox approach is ridiculous (in case I hadn't made that quite clear seeing as I'd mentioned IE in the same sentence).
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|To bad it looks like you can't just open private browsing tabs. For instance you type in the URL in the address bar and click a button that says private before pressing enter, or you if your opening up a link you can right click on the link and open as private, then a box comes up and asks if you want to always open this site up as private and you can press yes or no. This way you can have your private sites and regular sites in one browser.
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|That would come too dangerously close to making sense!
;-)
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|Well Google Chrome can't even do that, nor can IE8.
Firefox can't have a private window and a normal window, like the other two. You have to suspend your normal browsing session and close it down completely to enter private browsing. To get those pages back you have to completely stop private browsing. Hopefully in 3.5 or whatever the next release is we'll see the ability to have private browsing and normal browsing both at once... right now it seems like a bit of a hack, since they have to close down the current session first.
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|If in Firefox I can have an IE tab open in at the same time without having to close the FF tabs you would think it wouldn't be to difficult to have private tabs with regular tabs. But I'm not a programmer so I could be wrong.
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|Mozilla also wasn't the folks who coded that IETab extension, so... ;)
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|This is true, but if they wanted to do it they could figure out how to, or since its open source find someone to do it.
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|Why not use install the current Stealthier addon (https://addons.mozilla.o...n-US/firefox/addon/1306) in the FF3.0 browser if you want that feature now?
I don't see what's the big whoop whoop about the feature... just look at the extension, and add it into the core.
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