

'Porn mode' not necessarily anonymous - hackhead
http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20012984-12.html

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telemachos
_"[T]he paper concludes that "current private browsing implementations provide
privacy against some local and Web attackers, but can be defeated by
determined attackers."_

This doesn't live up to the earlier claim that "The private browsing options
provided by the four major Web browser publishers aren't as anonymous and
secure as most users might think." What _most users_ think about porn mode is
that they can surf for porn (or birthday gifts, for that matter) without their
significant other (or children) finding traces the browser history. If that's
the case, most users are getting what they want. (People who are worried about
TOR are a whole different category.)

~~~
sprout
One of my bigger uses for private browsing is online banking, and I think it's
a use that a lot of people would benefit from taking.

Sort of like hashing the entries in your .ssh/known_hosts, it's better that
someone who has access to your laptop not know where you bank.

And for extra security I tend to use private mode in a secondary browser.

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ugh
Wha…? I always assumed (and assumed that everyone else also assumed) that
private browsing’s sole purpose is in me being able to hand my laptop to
anyone I want without having to worry about my browser history. Nothing more.

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eklitzke
I'm not as familiar with the Firefox extensions, but in Chrome all extensions
are turned off by default in incognito mode -- only those extensions that
you've explicitly enabled will be active in incognito mode. Furthermore, the
docs for Chrome explicitly encourage developers to have their extensions
whether the browser is running in incognito mode, and adapt appropriately.[1]
So it seems likely a few of the top extensions using the various storage
mechanisms (localStorage or otherwise) are already doing the right thing; it
would be interesting to see an analysis of this, however.

[1]
[http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/trunk/overview.html...](http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/trunk/overview.html#incognito)

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profitoftruth85
They really should have covered Opera if it was the only one without
extensions, but I don't know how much effort it would have taken, I hope it
wasn't out of laziness.

