privatebrowsing

I did expect the community to get interested in extending the Private Browsing mode by developing extensions, but I didn't expect it to happen this soon!  I'm happy to announce that the first Private Browsing extension has been developed by the community member Kurt Schultz! This extension adds a toolbar and a status bar button to Firefox for quick access to the Private Browsing feature, and lets you toggle a few of the underlying preferences as a bonus!  Grab it while it's hot from AMO!

Private Browsing is one of the new features of Firefox which extension developers should start to handle in their extensions.  The API for this new mode is quite straightforward, and easy to use.  In addition, theme developers may want to style Firefox differently inside the Private Browsing mode.  That is also insanely easy to do.  In this article, I'm going to give you an overview of how the API works, plus with some sample code.  Note that what I'm explaining here is based the latest features landed on Mozilla trunk, and I don't expect any of them to break before the final release of Firefox 3.1, but we may land extra API support if add-on developers demand it, so make sure to leave your comments.

Today, a major feature was added to the pre-release versions of Firefox 3.1, called Private Browsing.  I've been working for quite some time on this, so I thought it may be a good time to write about what this feature is and how to use it.

I'm pleased to announce that the first pieces of the Private Browsing feature have just landed on Firefox trunk!  This might not be something to get too excited about, since all of the landed code remains disabled for now, but it's a big breakthrough for me, considering the fact that I've been playing with this code since January!  Some of you may even remember that this feature was cut off Firefox 3 because of the fact that it was too big to take at that stage of Firefox 3 development, it will be included in the final release of Firefox 3.1.

My work on the Private Browsing patch is soon going to enter a new stage.  Four of the modules that the patch is touching already have unit tests.  The only part of the patch which is not correctly implemented yet according to the recent changes in the functional spec is the download manager module, which needed a back-end change to support in-memory databases.  I've implemented that in another bug I filed to track it, and my patch there is waiting for review.

Followup from my previous post, I prepared Windows and Linux builds for my Private Browsing patch.  You can download these builds and try them out.  Feedback is much appreciated!

With the feedback from Alex Faaborg on the status of Private Browsing in Firefox, and urged by the Incognito browsing mode in Chrome and Internet Explorer's InPrivate Browsing (and of course, Safari's Private Browsing mode), it seems that there's a chance to have this in Firefox 3.1.  In case you don't already know, I had written a patch which added support for the Private Browsing mode a while back, but it never saw the light of the day.  Now, I have a new patch which implements the new requirements nearly completely (the only part missing from it is disabling DOM Storage in private mode.