Firefox 3.5 Privacy Mode AKA Porn Browser Mode

This is (In my opinion) the most significant change in Firefox 3.5. Not that its something new. I did remember it was attempted back in the days of Netscape. But now, someone finally give it some serious thoughts (in Firefox anyway).

To turn it on, simply go to Tools>Start Privacy Browsing (or CTRL-SHIFT-P for lazy bumps like me). But first, make sure you are on Firefox 3.5 final. You will notice that it will ask you to confirm. What they failed to tell you (or warn you) is that it will close all your current tabs, cancel all your downloads in the background etc. Anyway, ensure you are all ready to switch off all those, click yes and then you are in.

In the privacy mode (or AKA Porn Browser Mode for good reasons), all your surfing is not tracked. No history, no saving of password etc. Therefore, you can safely visit sites and download stuff that you do not want to leave traces on the machines. However, you need to take note that this can be a false sense of security. Whatever you do can still be tracked on the proxies, firewall or whatever was installed outside your machine. It can still be TRACABLE. So do not let the privacy mode fool you. You do NOT was an email from your boss asking why are you visiting playboy.com daily in the morning. :)

In addition, you will notice that there is a Clear Recent History option right under Tools below the Privacy mode. This does what it says and can be access lazily by CTRL-SHIFT-DEL. But its more than just clearing all history. It allows you to choose what history you wish to destroy. This is based on time though. If you wish to clear history about certain sites (such as porn4free.com etc), you can do so easily by using the History Library from History>Show All History (or lazily CTRL-SHIFT-H). Under the site you wish to purge, right click and select Forget About This Site. If you are in Privacy mode already, you will notice nothing comes up in the History Library obviously.

If you are really very very concern about privacy and press CTRL-SHIFT-P can really hurt you, do not worry. There is even a way to switch off all history completely whether you are in or out of privacy mode. To do that, select Tools>Option. Click on the Privacy tab and you can change it to Never Remeber History. You can also clear your cookies here by clicking on the link "remove individual cookies". Of course, you can also tailor the history behavior by selecting "Use Custom Settings for History" and change whatever options you desire.

Supposely you want to do something about the Location Bar search as well. You can change that in the same place under Tools>Option, Privacy tab. You can change it such that it search from history, bookmarks, both or none. That way you won't accidentally display search results from places you do not want to show your child when doing some homework together.

Normal users still have another option. Its call Firefox portable. I believe 3.5 is out as well. check it out at:
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

For U3 and other portable options, check the respective sites. The good thing about portable version is that it does not even cache into the actual system's harddisk, but instead in the portable devices only. The bad point is that portable version are usually not as often updated.

Ok, for normal users. You should stop here. What I am going to say is really advance stuff which can break or damage your Firefox installation. Firefox has a developer mode which has something known as Profile Manager. To access this, you will need to execute :

firefox.exe -ProfileManager

This will allow you to create, delete and manager different profile for use in Firefox. This should be the clean and ideal way to manage bookmarks and history. However, since this is a function that Firefox wish to hide from the users, let's just presumed this is not stable and usable for some reasons. In any case, the documentation for the Profile Manager is here:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+Profiles