Privacy seems to be the magic word in the browsers world these days. Surfing without leaving any trace seems to be the ultimate offer for any browser out there. Internet Explorer has it, Google Chrome offers it and now it seems like the next version of Firefox, Firefox 3.1, will add it as well.

Since the release of Google Chrome, every browser maker has entered in an emergency mode and it seems like Mozilla is paying attention to what is happening with the competition.

Also, the beta 2 version of Internet Exploerer 8, released late last month, features a full-fledged privacy mode which will prevent the browser from saving any browsing or search history, will delete your browser cache at the end of every session and will also disable saving of cookies, data, passwords and other offline data. The tools share the "InPrivate" name, which Microsoft registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office several weeks ago.

According to note from Mozilla Wiki, the next version of Firefox will offer a Private Mode. In fact, the feature was intended to be released in the version 3.0, but it was dropped to keep the browser on schedule.

Mike Connor, Firefox lead develop, has a pretty good description on how the Private feature will look like.

“Ensure that users can't be tracked when doing "private" things. There should be a clear line drawn between your "public" and "private" browsing sessions. It is acceptable to let things touch magnetic storage, as long as the cleanup mechanism is robust enough to clean up,” he wrote in a note.

”Non-goal for 3.1: Separate process sharing (some) data. When we get process-per-tab we can make it more IE-like, but doing this also means that we have to have something like their "hey, you're in private browsing mode" banner on the URL bar for all the world to see. Which, to me, is fail” Connor also wrote.

From the technical point of view, private browsing means that certain data such as browser cookies, Web history data, Web searches and stored form data should be discarded after the users have finished browsing.

Still, the most browsers load cookies memory to make Web pages load more quickly and that entering into privacy mode with cookies in memory leaves an opening for those cookies to still be tracked, explained Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox development for InformationWeek. He also pointed that Firefox was the first browser to have a button for discard private data.

There are also certain add-ons for Firefox 3.0 and the previous versions, thanks to which the users might hide surfing trails that the browser leaves behind.
One of those add-ons is Distrust, developed by Itmar Kerbel. Once Distrust is turned on it monitors Firefox for its activities.

When activated it reads and remembers your old preferences about cache and cookie state. It then changes the cache state so no cache will be written to the disk and the cookie state so that cookies will expire once FireFox is closed. It also notes the time it was started so when its deactivated or when the browser is closed the extension deletes all the history items that were registered between the start and end of that time period.

Another add-on is Stealther, which temporarily disables browsing history (also in Address bar), cookies, downloaded Files History, disk cache and recently closed tabs list.

Earlier this week, Mozilla released the Alpha 2 version Firefox 3.1, code-named Shiretoko. The browser is built on pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, which forms the core of rich internet applications such as Firefox.

As you can imagine, because the battle of the browser is heating up, Mozilla intends to surprise us with some interesting goodies.

For example, amongst the new features included in Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 are the support for the HTML 5

Also, in the new browsers the users will be able to drag and drop tabs between browser windows and Firefox 3.1 will include also support for CSS 2.1 properties and CSS 3 properties.

According to several media reports, a release date for the first beta version of Firefox 3.1 has not been announced. However, apparently the Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 will be available sometimes in October.