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Comment by reader_1000 | Hacker News Reader

When you try to open closed tab back (ctrl+shift+T), Chrome does not open it. I thougt this is a good way of handling history in private mode, you close the tab and everything is gone. However when I tried same thing on Firefox, I saw that Firefox happily opens the closed tab back, which surprised me. So I think while trying to find a balance between usability and privacy, browser vendors choose different paths.

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In Firefox you create a private window, not a private tab.

Inside the private window, you can have multiple tabs; closing them and restoring them. Once you close the private window everything is gone.

Chrome also uses a private window, not private tabs. You just can't restore closed private tabs, which is probably how it should be.

The thing is that chrome sandboxes every tab, but firefox doesn't and it's easier for firefox to restore tabs than for chrome is to do.

Chrome fires up a separate thread for each tab. So any information about that tab is lost once the tab, (and thus sandbox) closes. No information specific to the tabs is stored in the window unless explicitly done (like bookmarking). Thus, the session history is stored inside that sandbox, so it's gone once it's closed.

Firefox is maintaining a window with tabs within it. So it can still keep your session info for each tab stored at the window level and restore it even after a tab is close.

I was talking about how tabs is handled in private window.

> In Firefox you create a private window, not a private tab.

This isn't true either. Log in to a site in one private window and then open another one. You'll be logged in in that one too.

While Chrome does forget about the history of the closed tab, cookies are shared across incognito tabs/windows and aren't wiped until all incognito tabs are closed. You can still be tracked and associated with anything you visited in that closed tab if you have other tabs open.

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