Skip to main content

Protect Your Privacy When Using Firefox in Presence of Others

Should someone arrive unannounced at your desk and ask you to show something in Firefox or want to borrow it for a while, will you comply? Are you sure your browser history is clean and there isn’t something you shouldn’t be viewing? Nothing is more embarrassing when you have people around, and you start typing an address in the URL bar and Firefox autocompletes it with the most inappropriate address from your bookmarks or history. How you wish you had time to delete your browser history before starting, or that you had never saved that website to Firefox’s bookmark.

You can avoid such embarrassments in future by making a small preparation – install Presentation Mode.

Presentation Mode is a simple add-on for Firefox that protects your privacy by allowing you to temporarily disable autocomplete, hide past searches, disable the New Tab Page and collapse the bookmarks bar before you start giving a presentation. This can be done with a simple click of a button and at short notice.

presentation-mode

When you are in the middle of a browsing session, and someone arrives unexpectedly and you need to show something in your browser, just click on the red icon in the extreme right of the add-on bar to start the Presentation Mode. When this mode is enabled, Firefox saves all active tabs and closes the current browsing session and starts a new one. The new session has the following privacy settings enabled:

  • Autocomplete in the address bar is disabled. This prevents Firefox from showing your browsing history and bookmarks. Be aware that this extension doesn’t delete history which can be viewed from the history menu.
  • New Tab Page that reveals your top visited sites when a new tab is opened is disabled.
  • The bookmarks toolbar is automatically collapsed.
  • Clears the last searched text and disables search suggestions in search box.

To exit Presentation Mode, click on the button again and the previous browsing session is restored and privacy restrictions lifted.

Comments

  1. Any way to move the button off the Add-on bar? I've tried with the 'Customize' option that normally allows you to move stuff, and it moves the image, but then nothing happens when I click on it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You can move the icon to the address bar, if you want that. Otherwise, there seems to be no other way.

    ReplyDelete
  3. try the extension UI Fixer
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-4-ui-fixer/

    ReplyDelete
  4. I was using Firefox before but due to auto-save pages in it, I uninstalled it and now using Google Chrome but after reading this post, I am thinking to use Firefox again.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I was using Firefox from last 3 years. It is still at No.1 in my computer. Because its features and protection of privacy policy.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.

Diagram 101: Different Types of Diagrams and When To Use Them

Diagrams are a great way to visualize information and convey meaning. The problem is that there’s too many different types of diagrams, so it can be hard to know which ones you should use in any given situation. To help you out, we’ve created this diagram that lays out the 7 most common types of diagrams and when they’re best used: