Webmonkey.com reports that Mozilla developers are currently working towards new privacy features for Firefox 3.1, the latest version of the Firefox browser due for a late 2008.

Private browsing, also known as ‘porn mode’, restricts the information that is saved when you visit websites, according to Webmoney. In this mode, cookies are rejected, URLs are kept out of the browser history, and forms are not auto-filled, according to the article.

The article reports that most believes that the major use for private browsing is porn, it can also be used on public computers, when users don’t want confidential information saved such as passwords or banking info.

The idea of private browsers was first developed by Apple’s Safari browser nearly three years ago, according to Webmonkey. The article also reports that the Internet Explorer development team will also feature an ‘InPrivate’ mode, and Google’s new Chrome web browser has an ‘Incognito’ mode.

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A very simple marketing scheme from Mozilla worked so well that it almost backfired, simply because too many people took up the company’s challenge to download 5 million copies of its new browser, Firefox 3, in a 24 hour period.

Earlier this month, Mozilla announced that it would be releasing the new version of their browser software, Firefox 3, on Tuesday, June 17. Mozilla gave users a goal: get as many people as possible to download Firefox 3 on June 17 to break a Guinness World Record for the most downloaded software in a 24 hour period. The goal was to download 5 million copies of Firefox 3 onto computer across the world, according to Dwight Silverman’s blog on the Houston Chronicle website.

The software was formally released at noon on June 17, and so many people tried to download Firefox 3 at once that the server crashed. The website was up and running by 1:18 pm and the clock for the record was reset, according to Silverman. Four hours before the end of the 24-hour time, Mozilla had far surpassed its goal – by 1.1 million. At one point 9,000 downloads a minute were occurring., according to Mozilla’s corporate blog.

News of the downloading frenzy found its way into the front pages of many media outlets, including BBC.co.uk, NYTimes.com, Liberation.fr, laRepubblica.it, Digg, Slashdot, Techcrunch, and Yahoo! News. Over 500 articles about the launch were linked to Google news, according to Silverman’s post.

In the end, over 8.3 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded. More than 2.5 million of those downloads were in the United States.

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