Firefox continues to add features to pre-release builds of the venerable web browser's next incarnation, Firefox 3.1. The latest thing to hit the development trunk is the new private browsing feature, otherwise known as porn mode.
To see the new features, you'll need to download a nightly build, which is not something we recommend for most people, but if you've just got to try it, you can grab a copy from the developer site.
To enable private browsing mode, head to the tools menu and select the new Private Browsing option. Once you do, Firefox will stash away all your current windows and tabs and offer a new window that displays this message (Minefield is the code name for pre-release builds):
From that point on Firefox will will dump your history, cache, download history, saved passwords, searches, cookies and more as soon as you switch back to normal mode.
Of course, while private mode is a nice feature addition, it's really just Firefox playing catch-up with browsers like Apple's Safari, which has long offered similar features (IE 8 will also offer a privacy mode).
For now that's all you get with Private Browsing in Firefox, but user experience designer, Alex Faaborg, has some very interesting ideas about how to improve on this foundation. Faaborg envisions rolling Private Browsing mode into the Firefox privacy preference pane to offer much more fine-grained controls.
As you can see from the mockup above, future versions of Firefox would offer options to selectively control more aspects of what Firefox remembers -- want to save your history, but dump recent searches? No problem.
Unfortunately there's very little chance this beefed-up privacy interface will make it into Firefox 3.1. It seems more likely we'll have to wait for Firefox 4 to see these changes.
In the mean time, look for the limited, but capable, Private Browsing to land in the next Firefox 3.1 beta, which should arrive later this year.
[via Mozilla Links]
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