Alex Faaborg, of Firefox UI fame, has posted quite an interesting story on his blog. As you may know Firefox 3.1 will introduce a privacy mode similar to Chrome, Safari and IE, and such a big new changes needs a coat.

But it wouldn't be Mozilla if it would be just a plain copy-and-paste action, therefore more changes are detailed in Alex Faaborg's blog that could be realized in Firefox 3.2 and beyond.

An improved "Clear All History and Data" looks much like the one found in Google's Chrome, and extends on the idea behind "Clear Private Data". Besides selecting what data to delete it also allows a more human way of saying how much out of your history you want to delete by specifying a time range.

New is the "Clear Recent History", which allows you to easily delete portions of your history based on a time range. This way you do not need to constantly alter your "Clear All History and Data" dialog.

Another big change is the Privacy options in the Options window. It's look much more organized, and shares a lot with the "Clear All History and Data" dialog. An important choice is the way you want private data to be stored, where you even have the option to clear it on exit, or always browse in a privacy mode (which stores nothing on disk). Most requested is the ability to configure the location bar to display bookmarks/history as well as which tags to hide.

The privacy mode itself is also displayed as being accessible through the Tools menu. This function will probably work similar to Chrome and Safari, and thus won't store any data while switched to this mode. The power of this feature is that you can temporarily browse in privacy until you resume normal business.

All in all it looks quite nice from the mock-ups and Mozilla is well on their way to keep up and surpass the competition.