Internet Explorer 8 promises to let people surf without leaving a trace.

There is a Firefox add-on that does exactly this: Distrust. Unfortunately the Firefox 3 version has not been approved for download at the official add-ons site yet, but you can download it from the developer's site.

There's an interesting review of other privacy-related add-ons at Linux.com.

And of course, private browsing is already available in Safari, though it's not flawless.

Interesting, I may have to play with that. I presume that would keep things out of FF3's address bar.

@hircus: The safari link has nothing to do with Safari. To copypasta one of the comments from that article...

"I should probably point out that this is the DNS cache for the entire system that you're viewing/clearing - and thusly will contain a list of webservers with which communication has been established (or more acurately, DNS lookups have occurred against those servers) from *any* application in the system.

So, technically, if you use Firefox's 'Clear Private Data', you'll still need to flush the cache to remove any traces. The same would occur if you were to ping a server, check email, or perform just about any internet communication, really.

The purpose of the DNS cache, of course, is to prevent the system from constantly have to re-look up the IPs (and other DNS data) of servers which it has already requested of your DNS server - which has a significant latency in and of itself." - Christopher, March 15 2008

@Torabu: You hit the nail on the head, and totally missing the paranoid thumb. Most people would not think of the DNS aspect as you just did. That feature is what is being offered in the IE8.
For example run to Doxpara Research to check to see if your ISP is vulnerable to redirecting and other malicious acts.

@Andimia: Funny! Forgot about ipconfig /flushdns
At least you don't have to worry about having hovering helicopters zoom your house after I buy some Starbucks coffee where these Muslims sit around and drink coffee outside. Better yet, I quit posting in my blog the moment statcounter started picking up hits from Reston VA and several nuke plants!
Back to the story, MS should have did this years ago, now the ads served up are just annoying but I've learned to look beyond them anyways. They were probably designed to cause desensitization in Internet users for purposes of subliminal message injection.

@Torabu

That's quite true; insofar as your exposure to snooping web sites is concerned, Safari is safe enough. Though considering Apple controls the entire operating system, they could potentially integrate their private mode to cover the DNS cache as well.

To achieve plausible deniability, you might not actually want to flush the entire DNS cache -- being able to mark sites to blacklist using, say, your browser, and having those sites be selectively removed from your DNS cache would be nice. Then again, your privacy is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain -- your router, your modem, your ISP...

@Andimia:

You are perhaps aware that Bruce Schneier, the security expert, unapologetically runs an open wi-fi network?

Now that Comcast is putting a cap, I think more people will start securing their networks. I'd hate to go over because some one else is using my bandwidth.

Leave it to Microsoft to do something so stupid.