Distrust

the Distrust plugin has done this for a couple of years now.

I saw what you did

You had to get "testers" and "tickle" in there, didn't you?

PornFox

Do people not just boot from a live CD for porn mode? That's what my friend tells me he does.

Does this mean,,,

Firefox users are wankers?

Nothing new here... move along, please

So the 'Fox will have a 'porn mode' to "...help you make sure that your web browsing activities don't leave any trace on your own computer" and IE8 will have a feature to "... switch off cookies, browsing and search history, (not) save form data and passwords (and) automatically clear the cache at the end of the browser session"

We've got these already: look in Tools --> Clear Private Data. I set the browser to clear private data when I close a session and the options are set to clear browsing history, download history, form and search history, cache, cookies and authenticated sessions. Additionally, I've set history at 0 days and cache at 0MB.

I also have Stephen Gould's little programme CleanUp! installed and I run it between every browser session - it empties recycle bins, deletes newsgroup caches, clears all cookies, deletes all prefetches, clears temporary internet files (in IE), and can also get shot of favourites, temp files and specified registry entries. I recommended (usual disclaimers) this utility and you can find it at

http://www.stevengould.org/

Of course, none of those precautions mean anonymous browsing; they can't stop your ISP or visited sites logging your IP address. If you want to browse anonymously (or, rather, semi-anonymously) you need to use Tor or a service like AnonyMouse:

http://anonymouse.org/

Nor will those precautions prevent your browser leaking info about you in headers - for that you need something like the Firefox Modify Headers extention:

http://modifyheaders.mozdev.org/

Has Firefox really got 20% market saturation? Who knows. My browser header's user-agent string has been modified to disguise my OS and browser type - why offer the bad guys useful info - and I know many Opera and Fox users set their user-agent to spoof IE (in fact, identifying itself as IE used to be the default option in Opera).

Nonetheless, I hope it's true - Microsoft deserves to face proper competition. Competition benefits us all - for instance, Microsoft lumbered on happily with the increasingly outdated IE6 until the Fox started grabbing market share.

Business Use

The browsing privacy ('pr0n mode') feature is probably going to make some businesses shy away from allowing their employees access to Firefox.

Of course, any company which takes its infrastructure seriously will more than likely use a squid proxy servers with active directory integration for authentication or some similar method so the internet access can be tracked regardless of the privacy mode being enabled or not.

Firefox might be more accepted for business and corporate use if some form of corporate settings template feature was employed to allow customisation, similar to how group policy is used to lock down internet explorer.

The openness of the settings and features such as the privacy mode do discourage businesses from using the browser even though it is superior to internet explorer. The only corporate users of firefox are likely to be the IT staff, designers and reasonably tech savy execs.

Snigger

"wipe clean tool"

*smirk*

*titter*

Seems somewhat useless

If they claim porn mode will not "leave any trace on your own computer", then I'd like to know if they actually prevent any files from being written to the hard drive and how they clean data in the swap file.

Just deleting the cache files after a porn session means the physical files are still on your hard drive for a forensics expert to easily retrieve (or anyone with enough skill to run a deleted files retrieval tool).

The Firefox developers should be careful about how they present this feature as it is not a 100% guarantee of privacy in any way.

All those

reminding us (the dullards that we are) of the fact that browsers have a 'purge' feature.

Well duh, we don't want the browser to forget everything!

@Sceptical Bastard

"My browser header's user-agent string has been modified to disguise my OS and browser type - why offer the bad guys useful info"

So that the server can serve up code optimized for your specific browser for one thing. And why do you assume that all websites are "bad guys"?

@ Seems somewhat useless

You are right to ask: "... how they clean data in the swap file"

The answer, of course, is that 'Clear Private data' functions (aka 'pron mode') do not clear the swap file. You need to do that manually. It's a cinch on most Linux distros because the paging files are usually on their own partition. It's not quite as straightforward on Windows but El Reg has this very useful article:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/05/wipe_swap_file/

You also state "...the physical files are still on your hard drive for a forensics expert to easily retrieve..." Yup, of course simply deleting a file does not remove it. Over-writing it does, however. Stephen Gould's CleanUp! (see my comment above) has an option 'Fully Erase Files (Wipe Clean)' which is better than nothing.

But a much better bet is to use the free well-established utility called Eraser. This gives you a choice of over-write methods including 35-pass Guttmann algorithm and the US DoD standard. You can erase individual files and you can erase all the free space on a disc. The utility also includes DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) utility, a bootable 'nix app that first erases then over-writes entire hard disks (very useful if you want to dispose of a computer or do a *really* clean install). details are here: http://www.heidi.ie/node/6

ram?

how hard would it be for them to, when in "secure" mode simply grab a chunk of ram and use that as a virtual disc for the cache. obviously this would have to be encrypted. since it will probably end up being written to virtual memory. but since the same program will read and write, and you don't want it to be able to remember the previous session you make the "key" random at program start each time.

obviously its utterly pointless when your employer/isp spys on you directly.

would also be worth adding built in TOR support. as well as an ability to view encrypted web pages (which could be only marginally more advanced than ROT-13) simply to spoof filters. (with a suitable apache mod to handle that end maybe) poor mans SSL if you will.

to me a "secure" mode is only useful at home, and then only if you simply don't want traces on *your* machine, and then only if it never writes to the disc.

easy way? probably an old pc with a decent amount of ram, and no fixed disc booting from a cd rom.

otherwise I'm not totally sure what they think they are actually hiding?

@ David Kelly; @ Claire

David:

"So that the server can serve up code optimized for your specific browser for one thing."

Web pages should be W3C-compliant. If they are, they will display in any browser. Bad web designers "optimise" their site for specific browsers - if they can't be arsed to make their sites accessible to all, then I can't be arsed to visit them. I support the Any Browser Campaign http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

Secondly, a user-agent string not only identifies the browser, it usually identifies the OS and its specific build. For example, it would identify not only Firefox (and the rendering engine as Gecko) but a specific distro of Linux or a version and build of Windows.

"And why do you assume that all websites are "bad guys"?"

Most of them are not (or, rather, are not knowingly so). But some are. Besides, data travels across the internet in packets (which, of course, can be sniffed) and browser headers are transmitted in clear text.

Claire:

the RAM suggestion would work. So would the HDD-less machine booted off a live CD. But, as you say, there are plenty of other points at which one's internet use can be monitored.

porn mode?!?

Porn mode? Nah, online christmas shopping for the spouse/kids mode!

How is this different

from the 'Stealther' plug in?

Firefox, Meh...

Firefox is still slower than Opera and IE, and it still looks like a** because the fonts aren't antialiased for LCD display. They're talking about jitting script, old news, Microsoft has done that for everything since they pioneered JIT compiler for VB in the 1990s. Plug-ins are the only possible appeal, but I haven't seen one that I really need.

@ Oninoshiko

thats why you only store the stuff encrypted in ram, its only stored decoded directly on screen. ok you can't "copy & paste" etc, but thats by design