Feel the Shiretoko Shock!
So what am I personally most excited about in the new Firefox? Well, I have no uses for Private Browsing Mode – I think porn is a terrible corruption of God’s design for sexual relationships, my personal medical condition that I research is by no means a secret, and I don’t share my computer with anyone anyway. The security UI improvements are cool and well worth having, but I’m not going to get phished any time soon. It’s wonderful that we’re now in even more languages, but I don’t speak any of them!
So really, I’m just waiting for sites to take the excellent technical and standards changes and build cool new stuff I can use. Web designers, what are you waiting for? :-)
I share your non-need for Private Browsing Mode, and I wish people wouldn’t use that other name for it. On the other hand, if we lived in Iran or China, it might be a life saver.
Consider this a plug for TOR, The Onion Router, which helps keeps communications alive in repressed countries. Please visit our little discussion of it here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1304165 .
On the other hand, those who aren’t sexually repressed by the irrational influences of religion might find the new porn mode quite handy (forgive the pun).
I’m pretty sure Iran and China monitor from the DNS and gateway level too. Won’t help there.
Also, aside from feature parity, Private Browsing mode is one of the best new features of Fx 3.5. Oh, and there are several good reasons I use private browsing mode RIGHT NOW:
1. Christmas/birthday shopping for the kids
2. Anniversary shopping for the Significant Other
3. Defeating nosy co-workers
4. Viewing personal information on any trusted, but shared computer. For example: I’m staying with my mother and I realize I need to pay a bill. I would prefer to use private browsing mode to check my bank balance and pay it.
Porn is just the most obvious thing that people want to keep private when they think of the internet. Private Browsing doesn’t enable pornography any more than the invention of the JPEG file formats did.
Well, if you live alone and nobody ever comes by and has need to use your computer, than you already have an all-encompassing privacy mode [well, other than God looking over your shoulder while you take a leak, but let’s put that aside for now].
Q: “Web designers, what are you waiting for?”
A: IE to catch up with the standards.
One of the best examples of Private Browsing mode was pointed out to me by Beltzner yesterday: checking your email on somebody else’s computer. If you both use gmail, for example, you’d have to sign that person out, sign in, do your email thing, and then remember to sign out again. (This last step goes doubly so for internet cafe situations, where you don’t even know who the next person to use the computer will be.)
With Private Browsing mode, you can sign in to your mail without your friends’ session being impacted, and not have to worry about signing yourself out since all cookies are being thrown away.
Tack: why would “those who aren’t sexually repressed by the irrational influences of religion” need a “porn mode”? If there’s nothing wrong with porn, why don’t they just surf it in normal mode? If other people discover where they’ve been and seem shocked, that would be a great opportunity to explain the new, enlightened ideas to them.
Having a special “remember nothing” mode for porn surfing is just a case of the irrepressible truth peeking through. Even those who try and convince themselves it’s fine secretly know it’s shameful.
J. MacNair, Joe: You are quite right. Private Browsing Mode is most useful, at least to me, when it’s available on someone else’s computer. I hadn’t thought of that, and it’s a very good point.
Here are some uses of private mode on your home/work computer:
– At work, checking your personal email (especially if you use Google accounts for home and work, which people here do) or online banking, etc (assuming this is ok with your workplace, which it is with mine)
– At home/work – similar to above, allowing you to log into multiple accounts simultaneously (not with Firefox, but Chrome’s dual window system works)
– At home/work, doing testing on a website – e.g. opening a web page in private mode, testing, and then closing + opening it again and repeating – lets you test over and over again.
Chrome’s method of having dual windows, where you can have a private mode window and a normal window open at the same time is an absolute wonder – much better than Firefox’s implementation where you have to close your old session. Early days though, and it’s nice that Firefox at least supports something now.
By the way – I use Firefox mostly, due to the extensions. I use Chrome as a backup browser, for its private mode (see above), and for its application shortcuts.
Gerv: I certainly wouldn’t care because if a friend or adult relative discovered my colorful history list, however I wouldn’t want my niece to stumble onto some history that may prompt questions should my extended family happen to visit.
This isn’t because of any fundamental “shame” as you suggest, but merely a by-product of current societal norms. And while I’d be happy to take many of those to task, my behavior meanwhile should be respectful of the way things are.
Insufficient morning caffeine: s/because if/if/
FF has some tricky opposition now from Chrome which is much quicker and arguably has the most useful features (despite not having many features). most of the real geeks i know are switching to Chrome.
despite the excuses listed in posts above, we all know that private browsing has one overwhelming use case. whether it is shameful as Gerv seems to think is another matter – but there are some cards that people like to keep to their chest.
FF has some tricky opposition now from Chrome which is much quicker and arguably has the most useful features (despite not having many features). most of the real geeks i know are switching to Chrome.
despite the excuses listed in posts above, we all know that private browsing has one overwhelming use case. whether it is shameful as Gerv seems to think is another matter – but there are some cards that people like to keep to their chest.
Agreed with Tack. If you live with family/other people, you’re bound to offend someone who doesn’t share your liberal perspective on religion or sexuality. I personally don’t have any problems with porn, and I don’t have any use for Private Mode in my personal computer.
Using it when using other’s computers (or public computers) sounds like a very apt use indeed. I hadn’t thought of that either.
I tried out 3.5, but the only change I *noticed* (versus 3.0.x) was a lot of crashing, so after about the fifteenth time in two days, I reverted. I imagine my problem was probably caused by an extension that wasn’t fully compatible, or something along those lines. If there were a compelling feature in 3.5 that I wanted, I’d probably put some effort into trying to isolate it. But there’s not. (This is not really a big criticism. Not everyone’s going to get excited about the same features, so there are always going to be releases that just don’t matter for some people. This one just isn’t a big deal for me. Private browsing is a big huge shrug, and as for video automatically playing in the browser window, the only thing I’d want, if websites were actually using it, is to turn it off.)
Actually, I remembered that there is a feature in 3.5 that I’ve been kind of looking forward to: text-shadow support. Not exactly world-rocking, but nice to have.