Sparking a privacy "outrage" from people who should be using Private Browsing mode

Jun 25, 2012 11:11 GMT  ·  By

Firefox's new tab page seems more trouble than it's worth, at this point. The feature has been available for a year now, in experimental builds, but was only bundled with the shipping Firefox with the latest release, Firefox 13.

It's a big new feature, in that it's hard to miss, but the new tab page is spartan at best. All it does is list your nine most visited websites.

You can pin sites to make sure they're not replaced automatically or remove the ones you don't like. You can also disable the feature altogether, well hide it at least, via a small button in the top right corner.

The feature proved rather polarizing, some people have been waiting on it for a long time, others see as an affront to Firefox's pristineness.

Either way, at the very least, with a feature so simple, you'd think it would work as expected and that Mozilla has thought about possible scenarios.

That's not the case, some users are now complaining that the new tab page takes snapshots of the websites they would rather not have others see.

Users can easily remove these entries or disable the feature altogether, but still, some are rather perplexed by Mozilla's incursion into their private time.

Some would say that this is what Private Mode was invented for. In fact, that's exactly what Mozilla said about the issue.

Still, it vowed to push an updated Firefox so that will no longer take snapshots of websites containing private details, presumably any page sent over HTTPS. But if that's the case, you're going to see a lot of blank thumbnail in the new tab page.

It must be noted that all that Firefox does is take a snapshot, stored locally, of the sites you visit. That data is not going anywhere and the only "privacy" worry is someone else seeing the pages, your online banking page for example, in Firefox.

In order to do that, they would need access to your computer, in which case, the new tab page should be the least of your concerns.

Alternatively, if you're using a shared computer or a public one, visiting your banking site or anything else you'd want it keep private is probably not a great idea, unless you're using Private Browsing, which, again, was invented for this very purpose.

It seems that once again people are outraged at things they're mostly to blame for. Still, if having snapshots of your email account or other pages you may visit when you're alone is a problem for you, you can simply disable the new tab page, or point it to something else.