this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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me_irl
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Incognito mode is such a terrible choice of name for this feature, and Firefox's "private browsing" name is almost as bad.
To the average non-techie user, 'incognito' implies being anonymous. And when you go anonymous then nothing you do is linked to your real identity, right?
Wrong.
In real-world analogy terms, it's more like using a pen-name as an author. Members of the public might not know the person behind the mask, but your publisher (ISP) and your agent (Google) certainly do.
Pretty obvious why people would get the wrong idea.
As a developer, my primary use-case for incognito is a new session to test a site with clean state, or - in absolutely dire circumstances - to cheat at Wordle.
Agreed. Amnesia mode would be a much better name, but I feel if Firefox changed to it some uninformed users might thing Chrome's Incognito mode was somehow safer.
Yeah, naming things is really difficult!
The most truthful thing to call it would be "Temporary Session" but that name requires an understanding of what a 'session' is, in terms of a container that scopes your locally-stored browsing data. It's immediately comprehensible to tech-types, but probably meaningless to the average user.
There's not really any name that can accurately and succinctly describe what Incognito or private browsing actually does in a way that a normal person will understand from the name alone, but Amnesia mode is a good suggestion at one!
New incognito tabs literally have a notice explaining what incognito mode does and doesnt do. People just need to read.
explaining bad behavior doesn't justify bad behavior
I don't think my girlfriend knows my pseudonym though.
yes, I do, Richard.
It used to be more incognito than it is now. Back in the day it blocked all cookies and sessions like it does now, but that alone was reasonably sufficient. Now there is tracking built right into the browser by Google, cross site scripting is common despite it violating several security standards, browser fingerprinting can isolate and identify you, and a lot of other general fuckery. It wasn't always this way. They should update it to say "no browser history mode".
It's not even really that. It simply doesn't save anything you do (which can be done with regular browsing modes by simply disabling cookies and automatically clearing the history upon closing the browser). It's more analogous to getting your browser just as drunk as you are so neither of you remember what you searched.
Do people not call it porn mode anymore? When it first came out, there was a lot of chatter about people not getting busted for their porn tastes anymore.