Besides blazing fast JavaScript benchmarks, privacy mode is the big new feature in modern browsers. The latest version of Firefox includes many privacy enhancements that can keep others from seeing what you've been up to while online. But what if a friend, family member, or boss wants to borrow and/or look at something on your computer? How do you play it cool and hide tabs you don't want them to see?
Developer Diego Ruiz has come up with a solution called HideTab that does just that. You can very quickly hide one or all open tabs with a keyboard shortcut or right-click contextual menu. This means the tabs can't be seen both along the top of your browser, and in the list of open sites. Instead, you can only see what you've hidden in a small, and subtle pop-up menu that sits in the bottom-right-hand corner of your browser. There's also a keyboard shortcut that restores all of the tabs you've hidden.
HideTab lets you hide certain tabs one at a time, or all at once in case someone comes by when you're looking at something you don't want them to see.
(Credit: CNET)One thing to keep in mind is that hidden tabs still continue to run in the background, which means if you're watching a video or listening to music it's going to keep playing. Hopefully a future version will provide the option to mute the audio from any tabs that are hidden.
Beyond privacy, this add-on can be a useful tool for leaning down the number of tabs you want to see. I regularly do tasks in my browser that involve hopping around to a few specific tabs, and sometimes it's nice to hone down to just those few without transferring them to a new window or doing a lot of reorganizing.
HideTab is an experimental extension, which means there may be a few bugs that have not been worked out prior to its review by the Mozilla community.
Related: How to hide your tracks at work
Late Monday a small, yet big Firefox feature was released to testers of Minefield, Mozilla's testbed application for new browser innovations. The new feature is private browsing, also known in some circles as "porn mode." When toggled, it takes your Web history, user names, passwords, searches, and cookies and bins them the second you close out the window, effectively making it appear that the session never existed.
Monday night's Minefield build included said privacy mode in all its glory, giving browser users the freedom to hide their browsing habits from others.
Similar to the implementation found in browsers made by Apple, Microsoft, and Google, the new mode can be started at any time during a browsing session. However, users must allow their existing window (with any open tabs) to be shut down while using the freshly opened "private" one. Once they close that out, it will simply re-open their original browsing session. Users can also opt to have every session start out in privacy mode, which could be a useful setting on public computers.
The feature has been on Firefox's road map for some time now (Mozilla's bug tracker has it posted back in mid-2004), however it could not be completed in time for Firefox 3's release back in mid-June. In the meantime users have been able to achieve similar results using several extensions--the most notable being Stealther.
Expect to see privacy mode making its way into Firefox 3.1, which will feature privacy and performance tweaks, along with improvements to the built-in tagging system. If you want to become a tester, you can find out more here.
[via Mozilla Links]
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