[whatwg] Private browsing vs. Storage and Databases

[Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ)]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 6:07 PM, Brady Eidson <beidson at apple.com> wrote:

>
> On Apr 7, 2009, at 5:50 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
>
>>
>> How are cookies handled right now?  Surely the issues should be pretty
>> much the same?
>>
>
> They are unspecified.  From this thread I have learned that Chrome and
> Firefox start with no cookies.  Safari starts with a snapshot of cookies at
> the point where the user entered private browsing mode.  I would not be
> surprised if Opera or IE8 were subtley different from either of these two
> approaches.
>
>  Option 3 is simple to implement and option 4 would difficult to implement
>>> efficiently.  Both would lead to bizarre behavior where data that the
>>> application thought was saved really wasn't.
>>>
>>
>> I certainly can't think of how 3 could ever cause a problem.  It
>> should be the same as the user just logging in from a computer they
>> haven't used before, shouldn't it?
>>
>
> I strongly share Jonas' concern that we'd tell web applications that we're
> storing there data when we already know we're going to dump it later.  For 3
> and 4 both, we're basically lying to the application and therefore the user.
>  Imagine a scenario where a user has no network connection and unknowingly
> left their browser in private browsing mode.  Email, documents, financial
> transactions, etc could all be "saved" locally then later thrown away before
> they've had a chance to sync to a server.
>

The same argument could be made for retaining cookies set during private
browsing ;-)


>
>
>  I don't think 1, 2, or 5 are good ideas, since they make localStorage
>> semi-usable at best when privacy mode is enabled.
>>
>
> Apparently Firefox plans to implement #2, and so far I'm standing by WebKit
> choosing #5 for now.  Options 1, 2, and 5 all avoid the problem that 3 and 4
> have which is that we're lying about saving data we have no intention to
> save.
>
> ~Brady
>
>
>
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