Thought stream
July 5, 2009
One of the biggest breakthroughs in the newest version, Firefox 3.5, came from an outside contributor. The organization wanted to include a feature to let users surf the Web without recording their history in the browser, but abandoned the idea when its developers couldn’t get it to work. With the deadline approaching, a volunteer came up with a plan for such a feature that Beltzer describes as “absolutely perfect.” A private browsing mode made it into the release.