Firefox released Minefield to testers, Mozilla’s application for new browser innovations. The new feature is private browsing, also known as “porn mode.” When toggled, it takes your Web history, user names, passwords, searches and cookies and bins them in the second you close the windows, effectively making it appear like the session was never opened. This gives browser users the freedom to hide their browsing habits from others. The new mode can be started at any time during a browsing session. Furthermore, users can also opt to have every session start out in privacy mode, a useful setting for a public computer.

This feature could not be completed in time for Firefox 3’s release in June 2008. Even so, users were able to achieve similar results using several extensions, the most notable being Stealther.  Except this privacy mode, Firefox 3.1 will improve its performance tweaks and its built-in tagging system. Mozilla decided to include the privacy feature after they saw it was also introduced in Chrome, Safari and the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8. Unlike Chrome, there’s nothing to let a user know he’s in private mode besides the text next to the page title. The completion of the private browsing mode is considered a major milestone towards the release of the latest version of the browser.

The privacy mode will appear in Firefox 3.1 beta 2 due for release by the end of the month. It is also available for testers who want to try it out sooner. The one who announced the feature was developer Ehsan Akhgari, in a blog post this morning. Akhgari has been the primary programmer who worked on developing this feature.