Nope, there’s no Private Browsing in my favourite mobile browser (yet). But as I have Firefox Sync activated between my 3 Firefox instances (winXP@work, Ubuntu-netbook@home and on my SGS2), I very much want to avoid syncing some of my browsing history over to my work-laptop. Developing addons for Firefox has become very easy and the JavaScript API does include access to the Private Browsing features, I quickly wrote this little addon to switch between Private and Non-Private browsing via the context menu using the online addon-builder:
var pb = require("private-browsing"); var myItem = require("context-menu").Item({ label: "Start Private Browsing", contentScript: 'self.on("click", self.postMessage);', onMessage: function () { if (pb.isActive) { pb.deactivate(); this.label = "Start Private Browsing"; } else { pb.activate(); this.label = "Exit Private Browsing"; } } });
All seemed great on my desktop Firefox, but it doesn’t work on Firefox Mobile. I could have known, if only I had read the documentation a bit more carefully: the context-menu and private-browsing modules aren’t functional on Firefox Mobile yet. Guess we’ll have to be good boys (and girls) while browsing on synced Firefox Mobile. But instead we can play around with the online Firefox addon-builder, that’s (another kind of) fun as well!