On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 4:02 PM, Ehsan Akhgari <ehsan.akhg...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 6:37 PM, Jonas Sicking <jo...@sicking.cc> wrote: >> >> Hi Ehsan, >> >> I'd really like to get some clarity in what the purpose of the private >> browsing feature is supposed to be. Last we talked about this the >> answer seemed to be "it's different things to different people. Only >> thing that we agree on is that a private browsing window should not >> write data to the user's disk". > > > To make it more clear, there is no contention on what the feature should do > from our side. It's just that we haven't done a very good job teaching what > this feature is intended to do to the _users_. There are for example > unintended use cases that came up after the feature was first implemented, > such as using this feature to login to the same website twice at the same > time (by essentially getting a separate cookie jar) but those are well > understood now. But developers are also users, and as a result, developers > who are not familiar with private browsing may also have assumptions formed > as users of the feature which may not accurately reflect what the feature > does. Perhaps this is an example of what you had in mind?
Right. I have never seen that documented anywhere. I think doing that would be very useful. Not just to make sure that we're all pulling in the same direction (Gecko developers interact with private browsing code all the time), but also so that we can have a discussion about if that intended goal is the right one. For example, the only intended goal that I've heard described is that "Actions taken during private browsing should not cause data to be written to disk". If that is the only goal of private browsing then for example adding the new tracking protection doesn't make much sense. But to be honest, I actually think that if that was the only thing that private browsing accomplished, then such a feature would be fairly useless, as well as hard to explain to users. It's much more likely that friends and family will see my google-stored search history, than that they will snoop around in the cache database or cookie database. / Jonas _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
