How in the Tech

Launch a private browsing window along side your typical Firefox window

By Adam Myers ⋅ January 25, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Firefox, Privacy

All the major browsers now ship with a private browsing mode that, for brevity’s sake, does not store any information as it relates to the session on the hard drive after the browser has been closed. Not wanting to leave any web browsing tracks is valuable for many reasons, and they aren’t all naughty or nefarious. Nevertheless, Firefox’s implementation always struck me as being rather inconvenient. By that, I mean when you initiate a private session your existing browsing session is terminated and a private session is launched in it’s place.

While I’m sure there are technical reasons, if not usability reasons, behind this direction, it still handicaps a great feature.  After all, Google Chrome behaves appropriately with it’s incognito private mode. Having recently upgraded all my installs to Firefox 3.6 I was pleasantly surprised to see this quirk address – ironically not by the folks at Mozilla however! Private Browsing Window is an extension available only to the latest 3.6 release that facilitates the ability to maintain a private browsing window along side your traditional window.

With the add-on installed, Private Browsing Window replaces the original menu option under Tools with that of it’s own. That’s rather convenient in my opinion and leaves little reason as to why you wouldn’t want this extension.