Comments on: What Are Web Surfers Hiding?

By: Chris Schmitt

Chris Schmitt — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:19:00 +0000

Horny teen boys all over the world will love this feature!

By: dp

dp — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:58:58 +0000

The anonymising feature strikes me as a bit of superficial dressing that’s meant mainly to give people a false sense of security. A lot of people are scared about online fraud, trojans, domestic spying and so on. They’ll be thinking any baked-in security features are a step in the right direction. I expect that any further security features would be equally welcome.

I don’t know that these features are anything new. It may just be that they’re enabled with a single click instead of going through the options pages.

By: Svetlana Gladkova

Svetlana Gladkova — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:11:53 +0000

I believe you under-estimate the importance of porn surfing – I have recently heard that every 9 of 10 clicks online are done on a porn-related link so that must prove why the developers see a potential for anonymous browsing.

By: Shane

Shane — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:42:07 +0000

Personally, I think it’s almost entirely related to porn. Just because a computer has only one user doesn’t mean that there aren’t many times your significant other is looking over your shoulder as you type something into the location bar :-0

I think private surfing is as important as it has always been. Previously, you had to be vigilant about deleting cookies, history, location bar etc after every ‘stealth session’. This often logged you out of your sites or wiped out most visited locations that were auto-completed.

I think once people got a taste of how easy it is to manage all of this with a privacy mode, they realised how badly they wanted it.

By: ahajduk

ahajduk — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:07:51 +0000

As for Private Browsing, all Mac users are enjoying it in Safari already… So it is not fresh idea from Redmond..

And I believe you confuse “private” and “anonymous” browsing. It is not the same thing.