I’m afraid Mozilla in the upcoming version of Firefox 3.1 will provide a new feature that allows users to surf the web privately (not anonymously though). This new Private Browsing mode disables cache-writings, tracking of URL histories and cookies. Take note that the exact functions and specifics of this new feature are not fully known as of time of writing since Mozilla is still working on it. You can visit Bugzilla and take a look at Bug 248970 to see their latest updates on this.
If you have an internet connection at home and your kids are fond of using Firefox (bear in mind that IE8 & Safari have the same feature), make sure that they will not abuse the ‘private mode’ feature once it is rolled out in Firefox 3.1. I’m not sure how we can do that at the moment but I hope Mozilla will think of something. Parents should be given the authority to manage and control the ‘private mode’ feature.
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8 comments:
Parents should be given what? You get what you pay for. Since you don't pay for Firefox, its difficult to demand specific features. In a way you pay for Internet Explorer (its bundled with Windows), so you could demand the ability to disable Private Mode on that.
Or, you could do your own parenting and directly supervise your kids. Putting the home computer in the den or living room does it.
Dear Anonymous...
Concerned parents like to see their children use Firefox at home because Firefox has many Parental Control Plugins.
If Mozilla goes ahead with their 'private mode' feature for Firefox 3.1, those Parental Control Plugins would be rendered useless. That's bad.
Like what I had said earlier, Mozilla should consider handing over the authority to manage the 'private mode' feature to parents.
What would you recomend for our children until they put Parental Controlls? Like the post says, IE, Safari and Chrome already use this. I bet Opera will copy that feature too, if not already. Oh yes, you could tell your kids to use Lynx. Too bad its for Linux and text mode only.
Shure is better than this horrendous "private browsing" feature.
I would suggest parents use one of these browsers...see my posts on internet safety here:
http://twurl.nl/xommpv
http://twurl.nl/88rma4
Hope this helps! ☺
Patty,
Thanks for the suggestions.
Anonymous,
Well... If parents could no longer manage and control browsers in the near future, they should consider relying upon OpenDNS (for an example) to do the job for them. Take note that OpenDNS has some nice content filtering or parental control features.
That is fine , just use x3watch.
http://x3watch.com/
"Keeps an honest man honest."
The Same feature is available in Google Chrome as well.
I don't really find it very troublesome though... There are lots of way to avoid being detected even if that feature doesn't exist in the first place even without the new privacy feature. And there are a lot of other methods to track what the parent's kids are doing.
So there's no need to have a big fuss over it.
The new feature is useful if set as default in cyber cafes though.
Isn't this what parental control software like Net Nanny is for? It will work for any browser too.
Net Nanny will record all Internet activity and you can view this information from any Internet connection.
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