Enhanced Privacy feature to be added to Mozilla FireFox Browser

Hot on the heels of Google’s Chrome’s “incognito” feature, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8’s “InPrivateBrowsing” and Apple’s Safari’s “private browsing” mode, Mozilla has announced that the new beta of FireFox 3.1 will also feature a similar technology.

Since none of these new privacy features hide your browsing history from your ISP or the websites you visit, the only thing that is really erased is your online web-surfing habits on your own PC. Affectionately, this new privacy tech always seems to get the moniker of “porn mode”. And for those slackers in offices around the world, don’t think that such features will make you immune from surfing the web unmonitored at work. Most medium-to-large businesses funnel their traffic through a proxy where your surfing habits can easily be monitored.

It is, at least, another sign that the browser manufacturers (all of whom except Mozilla are also heavyweight IT and internet companies) are at least trying to consider end-users’ privacy concerns.

There is one major flaw in this new found ideology though, and that is that both Google – and to a lesser extent Microsoft – are also hell bent on collecting as much data as they can about surfers online behaviors. Google makes 99% of its revenue from online advertising, and while Microsoft doesn’t have the same advertising reach, it sure as hell would like to. This paradox is not lost upon observers, who note it’s hard for the two mantras of “privacy” and “advertising revenue” to peacefully co-exist.