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Et Tu, Mozilla? Firefox 3 To Get Privacy Mode
Posted by
timothy
on Fri Sep 12, 2008 06:11 AM
from the nothing-wrong-with-some-occasional-flattery dept.
from the nothing-wrong-with-some-occasional-flattery dept.
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."
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Realism (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Realism (Score:5, Insightful)
I am willing to bet it doesn't stop Adobe Flash [epic.org] to store "cookies" on your PC. It's pretty useless for average Joes to hide their tracks surfing pr0n since they don't know how to disable flash cookies. Worse, they aren't even aware of the existence of these cookies.
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Re:Realism (Score:5, Funny)
Man, I watch porn just to get cookies flashed at me!
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And Responding to Safari... (Score:5, Informative)
Well technically (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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It doesn't have one? (Score:5, Funny)
Well what have I been using all this time then?
There have been plugins for this for a long time. (Score:5, Informative)
firefox has had plugins for this for some time, they just weren't there by default.
Re:There have been plugins for this for a long tim (Score:5, Informative)
True.
First page I found in Google:
http://lifehacker.com/software/privacy/download-of-the-day-stealther-firefox-extension-174752.php [lifehacker.com]
When you have a good extension system, not everything needs to be incorporated anymore. Like an Adblocker...
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Re:There have been plugins for this for a long tim (Score:5, Informative)
direct link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1306 [mozilla.org]
It has 820.000 downloads, so it's not like people have been missing this functionality from firefox...
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Re:There have been plugins for this for a long tim (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Parent
Subtle difference in Granularity (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Sod privacy! (Score:5, Funny)
I already know how to hide pr0n from the missus, I just need you to get it to me *FASTER*!
Re:Sod privacy! (Score:5, Interesting)
People having to hide pleasures from their wifes/SOs makes me sad (Y_Y)
Parent
Excellent word choice (Score:5, Funny)
Why Porn Mode? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Why Porn Mode? (Score:5, Funny)
Try - "Buying a secret present for your wife/girlfriend", I know, I know, slashdot - no wife/girlfriend.
Parent
Re:Why Porn Mode? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Links? (Score:5, Informative)
Not About Pornography (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Missed a trick (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Missed a trick (Score:5, Insightful)
A list of "private" sites is a pretty convenient way for somebody to figure out what sites you're going to that you don't want people to know about.
The whole point of this is to *not* leave a trail.
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Actually (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mind your French (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Pivacy, Private, or Porn Mode (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a login on your computer right? So that other people can't see your files? That means they cannot see your browsing history either. The only reason for a 'stealth mode' is to keep the browsing history secret from *yourself*, so it doesn't helpfully autosuggest embarrassing sites when you start typing in the awesome bar.
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Re:Why a seperate mode? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because:
* I like to be identified automatically when I open slashdot or any community forum.
* I like to come back to the site I just found yesterday
* I don't like to enter passwords again an again
* When I download something, I usually intend to keep it for a while
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