Configuring Mozilla Firefox for increased privacy:
Caching and Bookmarks

Table of contents:
Caching in FireFox consists of online and offline content caching. To disable caching and thus reduce the amount of private information stored we need to reconfigure following things:

Firefox internal settings - about:config

Firefox internal caching settings Some of the browser's settings aren't directly accessible from the options window. What we want to change is the browser's content caching settings. To access them you need to type "about:config" in the address bar. This will load up list of Firefox internal settings. Next to filter out interesting settings, write "browser.cache" into the filter edit box.

Settings of particular interest are browser.cache.disk.enable, browser.cache.disk.capacity and browser.cache.offline.enable. Set disk cache and offline cache enabled flags to false and the capacity to zero.

The risks of caching on disk are obvious - content of the pages you load are stored on your disk ready for somebody else  to view and analyze.

Offline storage cache

Offline storage cache configuration This is a fairly new feature that some websites use to try to store data for offline use. They usually store code and documents so they could be used when Firefox is switched to "Work offline" mode. As any cache it can contain sensitive information that you might not want to see recovered. So uness you got an appication you really want to use with this particular feature it's a good idea to disable this as well.



Bookmarks

For the sake of completness I'll mention bookmarks. It's simple - if you bookmark some page, that bookmark can be viewed by anybody else that has access to your computer. Athough you have to keep in mind that some sites can forcefully add bookmarks. So keep your eyes open and naturally don't add sites to bookmarks you don't want to be traced to.