A common thought is that in private browsing of IE 8 or incognito in chrome are meant to protect users from leaving their tracks behind.
From Microsoft:
“InPrivate Browsing
When checking e-mail at an Internet café or shopping for a gift on a family PC, you don't want to leave any trace of specific web browsing activity. InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer 8 helps prevent your browsing history, temporary Internet files, form data, cookies, and usernames and passwords from being retained by the browser, leaving no evidence of your browsing or search history.“
From Google:
“Explore Google Chrome features: Incognito mode (private browsing)
For times when you want to browse in stealth mode, for example, to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays, Google Chrome offers the incognito browsing mode.
- Webpages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito aren't recorded in your browsing and download histories.
- All new cookies are deleted after you close the incognito window.”
Is it?
1. Go to “C:\Documents and Settings\{user-name}\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\{some-hash-code}” and delete the some-hash-code folder.
2. Browse In-private using IE8 or Incognito using Chrome to some flash site (youtube for example)
3. Close the browser
4. See if the files were deleted…
(The same behavior was detected for Fire Fox’s private mode)
So, what happened?
It might be a bug or maybe some Macromedia workaround – In any case you should be more carful while browsing those flash sites. The files left behind are flash-cookies, sometimes saved in folders which renamed after the domain who created them…
And final note regarding IE8 In-Private browsing:
(since I’m not fully familiar with the parallel options of chrome & fire fox I’m not relating to them in this paragraph)
In-Private browsing feature is mainly focusing on protecting the user from being tracked by the server side, and not being tracked on the client side.
You should use In-Private browsing while trying to avoid sharing your information, such as browsing behavior, with 3rd party web sites of web sites you visit often in regular mode.
The discussed "”bug/feature/workaround” only make this argument more valuable.
* I would like to thank Shahar Bar for letting me know about the issue a while ago.
Using regular returnValue methods is not working anymore for IE8.
While looking for the cause I came across a very nice and clean solution for doing that:
IE8 ModalDialog returnValue