

Understanding Private Browsing  - blakerc
http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2010/08/23/understanding-private-browsing/

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Splines
I wish they showed how many people weren't using Private Browsing. For all we
know the spikes might just be because more people are browsing the internet at
those times (I suspect that's the lunch spike).

In the context of this discussion, percentage of Private Browsing activations
would be more useful.

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hamilton
This is a great point, and one we should have addressed in the post.

That said, there is not generally a spike in usage at lunch for anything else.
For many other metrics of interest we see a familiar sinusoidal wave of usage,
with the low point at around 3 or 4am, and a high point at approximately
6-7pm.

Thus the spike in usage at lunch turns out to be quite unexpected.

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xtacy
Apart from understanding how much time people spend in private browsing,
here's a recent paper that talks about the technical details of private
browsing mode of popular browsers (Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari).

[http://www.usenix.org/events/sec10/tech/full_papers/Aggarwal...](http://www.usenix.org/events/sec10/tech/full_papers/Aggarwal.pdf)

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borisk
Internet Explorer private browsing is fantastic (the only technical advantage
over competition left IMHO). Starting new private windows doesn't close the
existing tabs. One can have many private windows, each with separate cookies.
So logging in say google mail (or HN) with 15 different accounts at the same
time is not a problem.

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umjames
What version of IE are you talking about?

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borisk
8.0

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sosuke
Amazing that people are able to find what they want to see but don't want
others to know that they wanted to see and be done seeing whatever they saw in
as little on average as 10 minutes of time.

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corin_
I rather enjoyed Mike's comment on the blog itself

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confuzatron
Googling 'anniversary present ideas' and then buying the present shouldn't
take more than 10 minutes.

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briansmith
It looks like it could be providing a false sense of security for people at
work, despite the warning that Firefox gives the user about the employer and
ISP still being able to track what he's doing. Are people really reading that
warning and understanding what it means?

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bconway
Exactly. I've known very few companies (of size) where the
history/cache/whatever of your local browser is of any importance. It's all
logged and analyzed at the border.

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shalmanese
So I guess we now have empirical evidence of how long the average person's
masturbation session is.

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dangrossman
Why are web browsers reporting this information back to Mozilla in the first
place?

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daniel02216
It's a voluntary study:
<https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/testcases/aweeklife>

