According to TechRadar, Firefox 3.1 is due to include a private mode, much like Safari’s “Private Browsing”, Google Chrome’s “Incognito Mode” and Internet Explorer 8’s “InPrivate”, which will mean that your browsing history, cookies and so are not recorded when enabled. The idea of this is so that if you are doing some online shopping, maybe for your husband or wife, having the private mode enabled will mean no cookies, no history, no download history or pretty much anything for the session will be recorded by the browser, so they can’t go snooping around.

The most obvious use for most people is… well I am sure you can guess. In fact, if you can’t wait for sometime next month when the beta of Firefox 3.1 will be released, a plugin called Stealther has provided pretty much the same functionality to people for a while now, and is fully compatible with Firefox 3.

It is quite surprising this feature has taken so long to reach Firefox, and it is good to know that it is finally being added to Firefox. This is probably because of the recent spurt of browsers (like the above) who are building in this feature.

Firefox lead developer Mike Connor said on Monday, “”We can and will get this into 3.1 one way or another.”

The link to view the LHC (which thankfully didn’t kill us yesterday) is now online and has been floating around various places, but if you haven’t seen it, check out the webcams over here and keep up to date with the biggest Particle Accelerator the world has ever seen. You might even be lucky enough to catch some particles whizzing around.

Qik, the Ustream/Stickam/Justin.tv/etc for mobile, is expanding to more handsets, to go along their already supported handsets such as Nokia’s popular N95 and the iPhone (although it does you require you jailbreak, due to Apple’s limitations). Most of the updates are to Taiwanese company HTCs most recent products. New Qik software will be coming to the following phones:

• HTC Touch Dual
• HTC Touch Diamond
• HTC TyTn-II
• AT&T Tilt
• Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

Qik brings the idea of lifecasting straight your 3G or WiFi enabled phone, making it easier for anyone to share their life on the go. As I tested in a 3G area on my phone, Qik works amazingly well if you have good signal, and even on 2 bars of 3G I got a good upload speed. Just don’t if for lengthy periods on a limited data plan, or you might run up some lengthy charges…

Let’s have a look at Google Chrome now shall we?

The download is under 1MB. Small compared to the 7MB Firefox, and a minuscule bit of dust in comparison to the epic 100MB+ of Internet Explorer upgrades.

So what do you get when you first start it up?

Well, as you can see, a very uncluttered bit of software. A bar to type bits of text in to get you to a website, and a box underneath to view the bits of website you want to see.

Of course, the URL bar is a bag of tricks, using a similar technique to Firefox 3, by incorporating your History, Bookmarks and the Google Index to ensure that whatever you type into the address bar will get the website you want.

Google Chrome renders all the main website quite snappily and correctly, being that it conforms to XHTML as opposed to the mess that the Internet Explorer renderer is in. Of course, the browser uses tabbed browsing like Firefox and Internet Explorer, but each tab seems to be a seperate entity.

Often I find I have an errant tab which causes the whole of Firefox to crash. Nothing big thanks to the recovery system, but annoying nonetheless.

Chrome includes its own task manager that shows all the plugins and tabs, their memory, and network usage. Fantastic for seeing just how much bandwidth all those youtube videos are using, or closing an errant website that is bogging the computer down.

Developers will have access to more advanced features, such as a JavaScript console with debug and full coloured html source files of any webpage in question.

A new feature called Incognito mode will open up a new window, which looks just like any other, however this little window will let you browse without leaving cookies, history or temporary files on your computer. Absolutely perfect for accessing an Internet Banking site for example.

The move to web application orientated tools are also apparent. Google include an Application Shortcuts tool that let’s you easily make shortcuts from your desktop or start menu to any website online. Clicking on the shortcut runs a cut down version of Chrome without the URL bar, which makes it look like you are simply running an application from your desktop at times. A true step forward in making web apps the norm.

All in all, a very good start for Google in the browser wars. Chrome is a very simple, effective and fast browser, without the frills and buttons that other browsers push in front of you. With prominent advertising on Google’s website, and the exposure already given to it, we can only wait and see just how, and if, the industry is shaken by it.

Google Chrome, the latest beta to come out the ‘don’t be evil’ company, is going to be launched in 200 countries on the Windows Platform later today.

The only leaked screenshot we have came from the Google Chrome webpage which was up yesterday in a broken form, but now redirects to the Google homepage.

As soon as Chrome gets released, a preliminary review will be posted with screenshots and initial reaction, so make sure you watch this space!

UPDATE: Google Chrome Review now available…

I have been out most of the time today, and while browsing the BBC News site noticed the nice in page links they had recently started putting in articles alsobm work nicely on the iPhone. Well, except for YouTube, which asks for Flash. And yes, there will be some real posts later :D.

The BBC News website is one of my favourite sites, and while there today, noticed that the BBC have recently begun placing in page links in their articles, allowing you to look at Wikipedia entries, YouTube videos, PDF’s from Scribd and more without ever need to leave the page, by using a cool bit of AJAX, much like the image effect we have here on TechRave.

Personally, this makes the BBC News site even more valuable for me - I’m always off searching for stuff on Wikipedia after reading articles - so why not let them do it for you? For now it is only in testing, so you’ll need to find an article that has some links already in it. This one here should do just fine.

I’ve included some images here so you can have a look at how it works.