Ehsan Akhgari is a programmer living in Toronto working for Mozilla. He has over 10 years of experience on browsers and the web platform and Firefox. Learn more about him here.
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!
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.
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.
As you may know, while you browse the web, your browser usually records a lot of data which will later be used to improve your browsing experience.
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.
