The 'Don’t Leave A Trace' feature, as it’s being dubbed, ensuring there are no traces of browsing activity on your PC.
It seems that even on the Internet, people want to see a change they can believe in. According to new stats by Net Applications, that change means switching to Firefox, with the Open Source browser crossing the 20 per cent market share mark for the first time.
The browser actually attained the 20 per cent mark the week starting October 5th and has been flitting back and forth over it ever since. Microsoft's Internet Explorer seems to be steadily losing ground according to the same Net Applications data, dropping to 'just' 71 per cent.
Ken Kovash, Mozilla's metrics chief, overcome with joy, gushed " Congratulations to the Mozilla community for reaching this historic milestone!" in a company blog post.
When it comes to tech-related websites, Firefox does even better, lingering around the 50 per cent mark.
Features like today’s newly-released 'porn mode' in Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 could help swing the tide even further in the browser’s favour.
"Private Browsing aims to help you make sure that your Web browsing activities don't leave any trace on your own computer," noted Firefox programmer Ehsan Akhgar in another blog post.
The 'Don’t Leave A Trace' feature, as it’s being dubbed, was seen as being especially critical for version 3.1 as Google’s Chrome browser, Microsoft's IE8 beta 2 and Apple’s Safari all already have it.
But, warned Akhgar, "Private Browsing is not a tool to keep you anonymous from websites or your ISP". Neither is it a tool which can protect users from spyware. Instead, clarified Akghar, “Private Browsing is only about making sure that Firefox doesn’t store any data which can be used to trace your online activities, no more, no less.”
Let’s just hope it manages to do a bit better than Google Chrome's privacy mode, Incognito, which was slammed by advocacy group Consumer Watchdog the other day for being not nearly private enough.