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
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
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.