Firefox dumps privacy button

A security feature which gave punters total privacy has been dumped from the final version of Firefox 3.

Private Browsing would have disabled all caching, cookie downloads, history records, and form data during the session.

If it worked it would have meant you could surf the Web and leave nothing sticky on your computer.

Mozzarella Fountain’s big cheese in security Johnathan Nightingale, said that Private Browsing was, in principle, pretty cool. It would mean that what you were about to do would not be logged anywhere.

You hit a button and everything past that point isn’t logged. Then you hit the button again and you were visible again.

It would be handy while you were borrowing a computer and didn’t want your mates to see you had been checking out porn, violence, or Apple’s product pages.

Nightingale said, however, that the main problem with the button is that it touched a lot of code. It was likely to interact with Web sites and mashups and things like that and was just a crash waiting to happen