When you select Start Private Browsing, Firefox add the text “(Private Browsing)” to its window title bar. In the private browsing mode, your existing tabs closed, but they reappear when you turn off the private browsing mode or close the private browsing window. In a Private Browsing session, Firefox won’t keep any browser history, search history, download history, web form history, cookies, or temporary internet files.  However, the download files and bookmarks you make will be kept.

You can make the Firefox forget any site in your history. When you want to perform Clear Recent History, Firefox allows you to clear the past hour, two hours, four hours, or whole day, or every thing. It also allows you to selectively clear browsing and download history, cache, cookies, logins, and site preference. Thus you have more control over cleaning the History.

Personas or themes

Firefox offers a variety of personas or themes for changing its appearance. Many personas can be downloaded from the Mozilla Update web site.

Extensions

Firefox has wealth of extensions. Extensions allow the addition of new features through the installation of small software modules. Mozilla Foundation provides a lot of extensions for download on the Mozilla Update site. Most extensions are small in size (only few kilobytes). There have been some security issues in using extensions. There is a possibility for a user to download a malicious extension. Firefox must be restarted after extensions are installed, uninstalled or disabled. You can upgraded all themes and extensions downloaded from the Mozilla Update site through the browser interface itself. The extensions help the user to do things in a convenient way. This is one of the main strengths of Firefox.

Security

Firefox is the browser of choice in the matter of security. You can easily access information about the validity of any site by clicking on the small icon to the left of the URL. Sites with valid identity information the icon area turns green and you can find the site owner information and encryption status by clicking the icon. They are listed under a green cop image. You can check this by visiting Paypal site.

Conclusion

The Firefox has few disadvantages also. Still the performance, convenience and security made it choice of power users.

Features that made Firefox popular
Some of the new features in the latest version include: personas, or themes that help users to personalize the appearance of Firefox; a plug-in updater that will detect out-of-date plug-ins; stability improvements and performance tuning. Now, we will see some features that made the user prefer Firefox over other browsers.

Fine Tunings in Tabbed browsing
Firefox supports tabbed browsing. This allows users to open multiple pages in the same window. There has been lot of fine tuning in this feature. You can rearrange your tags by dragging them. When you open a new tab in Firefox 3.5, the existing ones slide to the left. Firefox also permits multiple homepages. It may be your current pages, or a group of Bookmarks. They are automatically opened in separate tabs. You can drag a tab into a new Firefox window by dragging it to the desktop—or drag a window back into the open browser to make it a tab. Firefox offer a blank white page on new tabs. If you have multiple tabs opened and you are attempting to close the browser, it will ask whether you want to save the open tabs for your next session or just quit. If you save them, you will get all your tabs and sites when you reopen Firefox next time. Firefox had an “Open recently closed tabs” and reopen recently closed windows option. So even if you’ve closed a tab or a whole browser window unintentionally you won’t lose them.

Awesome Bar
One of the special features of Firefox is the address bar. The address bar is officially called the location bar. When you start typing in it, it suggests a list of Web destinations based on your browsing history. The search bar is resizable now. You can divide the space between the location and search bars to your taste.

There is a star in the right side of the Location bar. It gives you a simple way to mark a page as a favorite, the difference between starring and bookmarking is this. Firefox’s star saves the page as a bookmark. That means the page doesn’t show up in the top-menu Bookmarks item, but it does show up in Recently Bookmarked.

Download manager
The download manager in the Firefox has the ability to pause and resume downloads and you can search the previous downloads. Once the Download is completed it is automatically scanned for viruses. You can change the default location where downloads are saved.

Some more features of firefox on later posts. Stay close.