How in the Tech

Preventing specific sites from showing up in Firefox history

By Adam Myers ⋅ September 8, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Firefox, Privacy

Concerns over a user’s privacy on the Internet is always a hot topic for debate. There likely isn’t a single user out there that would say yes, I’m ok with Company A tracking my browsing habits – safe to say? Unsurprisingly, I’m apt to agree and say that my privacy on the Internet is important to me. I would argue though, like most, that’s where our stance and zealotry ends. We happily use cloud computing and other Web 2.0 products, have no qualms about posting anything and everything on our Facebook, and allow Google to track our habits all under the guise of do no evil. Sounds kind of comical at the least and hypocritical at the worst right?

All three major browsers – Firefox, Chrome, and IE – support a notion of private browsing. Now they all have different buzzwords to for the feature but simply, a private browsing session does not record any of your activities performed while incognito. No history of sites visited, no advertising tracking cookies lingering around, nothing. It’s not difficult to see why a lot people are excited about porn mode – the unofficial designation for the feature.

The problem with private browsing is not the fundamental idea but the actual implementation. Currently, all three browsers present a jarring experience to the user, at least in my opinion – the big three require a completely second browser window to operate under, rather than a tab in the existing interface. I’m sure there is a technical reason behind this but it really doesn’t make it any more forgivable. Firefox handles the situation even worse; it closes out your existing browser window and launches a new private browser session in it’s place – you can’t have both running at the same time! That seems like a big concession to make in order to keep a few activities private to me.

HistoryBlock is a Firefox extension that addresses one of my major problems with Firefox’s Private Browsing. Using a black-listing approach, sites can be singled out and prevented from showing up in the browser history, recently closed tabs history, or download manager’s history. This is often all most of us want to accomplish in the first place and it does this all without interfering with your existing browser window. By not requiring the user to toggle the function on and off, it can be configured as with a set and forget approach. Very nice!