Private Browsing Made A Little More Private On Mozilla Firefox Pre-Beta

Private or incognito browsing mode on browsers has gained popularity among internet users globally because they help us erase any traces of our browsing habits on a local computer. While it is a useful feature it is not entirely effective, as evident from the warning card shown every time when you switch to private browsing. While certain aspects of private browsing such as browsing logs on your employer’s or ISP servers are beyond the realm of your browser’s control, Mozilla thinks it can tame other privacy issues in the next release of its popular browser, Firefox. People using the Developer Edition of Firefox have received experimental Private Browsing enhancements that can actively help blocking website elements that could be used to record user behaviour.


Certain website elements such as content, analytics, social and other services actively collect your browsing information even when you are in Private Browsing mode. You might have noticed that the Facebook logo with your username asking you to recommend certain pages when you are browsing outside of Facebook. Mozilla wants to block these web elements with the experimental release. Mozilla knows that blocking website features such as analytics could break certain websites on your browsers so it gives you a control panel to block or unblock features depending upon your use.

Apart from the privacy enhancements, Firefox is testing a multi-process feature called Electrolysis that could potentially increase responsiveness of your browser. Unlike Chrome that creates a new process for every tab, Firefox works on a single process. This means that if you are using multiple tabs your performance could be hampered. To get rid of this menace, pre-Beta users are getting an additional process along with the Firefox process that takes care of processing the web content. A fair warning though, this might not play well with certain Firefox add-ons. Finally, Mozilla has worked with developers across the world to create a new verification process to identify that add-ons being submitted to the browser’s library meet certain guidelines that promise adware free secure browsing.

Firefox promises more enhancements such as parental control, feature packed Firefox Hello and a full-fledged iOS browser in the future. For more information about this development, you can visit the New Experimental Private Browsing and Add-ons Features Ready for Pre-Beta Testing in Firefox - Future Releases where you can get the Developer Edition Mozilla Firefox browser and its release notes.