Defaulting to private browsing mode
blog.jgc.org
blog.jgc.org
That said, you may be interested in http://panopticlick.eff.org/, which shows just how private private browsing is...
Honestly I haven't noticed a lot of difference to my user experience, except except every week or two I have to click the login buttons on a handful of favourite websites. Since FF is still remembering the passwords, I don't have to retype those.
Other useful extensions I'm using: NoScript and HTTPS-everywhere.
I don't get why browsers allow long term cookies by default. Session cookies should be allowed by default, but "normal" cookies should be off by default. I've had mine off for years now without any noticably bad effect on my browsing...
You could do a per-cookie approval, but that gets tedious quickly.
In Firefox, set the "browser.privatebrowsing.autostart" about:config flag to true.
In Chrome/Chromium, append " --incognito" when starting to open an incognito window. Alias it or add it to your GUI shortcuts to start it that way by default.
In IE8+, append " -private".
Just change the various setting to not store cookies permanently, not store history for more than 1 day, etc, etc. I assume you still want a disk cache? Private browsing disables that, but that has a detrimental effect on your browsing.
This is a terrible idea for most people though. Every time I go to my bank it needs to re-authenticate me? It doesn't remember the sites I go to frequently? I need to login again every time I go to HN?
To me those are features, not bugs.
> It doesn't remember the sites I go to frequently?
Since they are frequent I remember them. The browser doesn't need to.
For my bank that means waiting to get an email and I would classify that as a pain in the butt if I had to do it every time I checked my account.
You can still let your browser remember your passwords. This reduces 'authenticating' to simply clicking a button. Or you could configure a whitelist of sites that are allowed to keep your cookies for a longer time.
And to 'remember' sites I go to frequently I have bookmarks (and my own memory). Then again, browser history did save my ass multiple times. It's the cookies that annoy me.
This, I do. All cookies are session cookies except for my bank, to save their "I use this computer a lot" cookie so I don't have to be challenged in addition to the anti-phishing and password stage. And, I trust my own website so that I can put 'newblog' into the awesomebar and start writing quickly.
The only problem I've had is determining which site cookies are important. The bank uses a 3rd-party provider for the Internet Banking Area, so their cookies have no relation to the bank name. Once Firefox has forced a cookie to session lifetime, it doesn't go back to being saved when you whitelist that specific cookie's domain, which was confusing when next I visited the bank and it had forgotten me. But after that visit, it was fine.
Not sure what the equivalent of this is in OSX or Linux.
The problem is that in the meantime I have started to never close my browser (notebook always just goes goes to sleep, no restart). So those settings aren't as useful as they used to be anymore.
there's also this chrome extension, but it only blacklists, not whitelists.