RSSFirefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 1: How private is private browsing?
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published June 29, 2009, 4:03 PM
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When you exit Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5, you cannot pick up the trail again from where you left off -- anything your browser remembered up to that point, has vanished.
Does the Incognito Window in Chrome work the same way? Surprisingly, no -- and this is where one starts evaluating the browser makers' design decisions. If you exit the Incognito Window ("Nothing, honey, wasn't doing anything…just checking statistics")re-enter it again, and then re-enter the page you were on, you'll find your shopping cart is intact, right where you left it. So exiting that window did not erase your trail.
But suppose that's what you want -- suppose you want to be able to hide the Incognito window on demand without destroying your shopping, should prying eyes happen to walk by. That actually makes this feature somewhat handy -- for the time being, Chrome is remembering something you want it to forget later.
At least, isn't that what you expect…for Chrome to forget it later? What happens when you exit Chrome altogether…does it forget your shopping cart then? No. Start up Chrome again, and your shopping cart is alive and well. And that could be a problem. This suggests that for any one Windows user account, there is a general track and an incognito track. When you exit Windows altogether, and restart Windows and Chrome, that's when you find out your shopping cart and history have been wiped clean. So the session key Chrome generates for Incognito is apparently only good for the current Windows session, and that's fine. But it still suggests that some session data is being maintained somehow while you're in Incognito mode, and that may not be what you expect.
Sometimes the best software behavior you can have is the kind you expect, regardless of whether it's the most convenient. Firefox erasing your tracks the moment you exit Private Browsing may not always be convenient -- you're covering your tracks, but also destroying anything you've accomplished in the interim. But Firefox says that's what it does, and that's what it does.
When Chrome's Incognito Mode first premiered, there was some concern from users who discovered that even though they used Incognito to log onto Google's services, Google's own Web history remembered their logins. But frankly, that's what users should have expected: You can't tell a server to which you've just logged in to not remember you just because you've opted not to remember it. That may cause an inconvenience for someone who uses Google tools to remember his history, but if he reasons things out in his mind, it's an inconvenience that can be expected and anticipated, and perhaps therefore avoided.
Google suggests that users who really do want their tracks dis-remembered immediately, use the Ctrl+Shift+Delete method (actually pioneered by Firefox) to selectively remove a day's worth of browsing history. Well, if that's the solution to the privacy problem to begin with, then remind me again why we even need Incognito mode?
Firefox's Private Browsing is plain, it's less flexible, and it's actually a little dull. But it does what it says it does and behaves the way one should reasonably expect. That's why I'm judging the victor in Round 1 of this duel to be Firefox 3.5. If Chrome had given me even so much as a warning about not clearing my history yet, or an option to either retain my Incognito history for the duration of the Windows session or not, then I would have scored this one for Chrome.
welcome and thank you for mercy
Score: 0
|I've been using Chrome Beta 3 for some weeks. I experimented with Incognito, though not with shopping carts. I just went to a porn site and found the history was not kept in the browser, but the site's cookie was. I had to use CCleaner to remove it.
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|Did you reboot prior to looking for the cookie? IIRC, chrome doesn't clear much of the stuff until a reboot occurs.
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|That's useless then.
Score: 1
|Why? Because it's that hard to shut down the PC?
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|I usually use Standby instead of rebooting daily. Most users would not expect cookies to be stored at all in Incognito.
Score: 1
|Technically, they aren't supposed to be. I'm sure it's something that they will fix eventually, but for now it requires a reboot. I don't consider it an "End of the World" bug, but I suppose there are people who will see it differently.
Score: -1
|what about Flash setting cookies?
Score: 1
|try better privacy:
https://addons.mozilla.org/sk/firefox/addon/6623
to the article, you can't really compare an unstable browser (Chrome) to a stable PLATFORM (Firefox 3.5).
it is like comparing your small yacht with a USS Enterprise ship, both sail, that's about it...
and trusting Google in privacy, what a joke, google lives from advertisement...
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|So where are IE8 and Safari left out?
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|Not sure why Safari was left out, but IE8 was left out because it really does not compare to Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. IE8 has by _far_ the worst standards support, by _far_ the worst performance, and by _far_ the worst security. Basically, it sucks hard.
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|Ok but this was about privacy, not internet standards...
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|I'm fortunate in the fact that I don't need to deceive my wife with all this newfangled stuff. I never buy the wife a present, and she knows it.
Score: 2
|When you closed out Chrome completely, before restarting it, did you make sure that no instances of "chrome.exe" were running. I have closed out Chome and still had the process running, it could conserve the cookies until all instances the process have ended completely. Just a possibility.
I am overall impressed with the results of Chrome's Incognito, I found it much easier to use and more enjoyable overall than Firefox's Private Browsing sessions.
Score: 1
|I generally browse with Chromium nightly builds as my default browser, updating them a few times a week. I'm currently using 3.0.191.0 (19573), and the behavior in this version is completely different than that found in the official release of Chrome. If I close the browser, everything is gone. I just added an item to a shopping cart at Newegg, closed the browser, and went back to Newegg, and the item in the cart is gone. It's hard to believe that the 'official' builds of Chrome behave that much differently than the nightly builds. There may have been a bug in that build preventing cookies from being cleared.
Score: 2
|I really like Chrome, but Firefox with all its plug-ins, in particular Ad Block Plus and Firebug, make it the browser of choice.
Score: 0
|My default will always be Firefox=) chrome is not that bad either I use both can't wait to try 3.5 when it comes out both are way better than IE8...
Score: 1
|It would be nice if Firefox would allow you to simultaneously run a "private browsing" session and a normal session.
Score: 4
|Good article, but my experience with Chrome is different. I can log into various things (betanews, slashdot, gmail, etc.) and even put some things into a guest shopping cart on various sites (newegg, zipzoomfly, etc.). But when I close Chrome and open it again, it is all gone, without needing to reboot. This is how incognito mode has worked for me in Chrome since day one, am I missing something here?
Score: 4
|definitely Firefox does it the way it should be.
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