Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 1: How private is private browsing?

When you exit Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5, you cannot pick up the trail again from where you left off -- anything your browser remembered up to that point, has vanished.

Does the Incognito Window in Chrome work the same way? Surprisingly, no -- and this is where one starts evaluating the browser makers' design decisions. If you exit the Incognito Window ("Nothing, honey, wasn't doing anything…just checking statistics")re-enter it again, and then re-enter the page you were on, you'll find your shopping cart is intact, right where you left it. So exiting that window did not erase your trail.

But suppose that's what you want -- suppose you want to be able to hide the Incognito window on demand without destroying your shopping, should prying eyes happen to walk by. That actually makes this feature somewhat handy -- for the time being, Chrome is remembering something you want it to forget later.

At least, isn't that what you expect…for Chrome to forget it later? What happens when you exit Chrome altogether…does it forget your shopping cart then?
No. Start up Chrome again, and your shopping cart is alive and well. And that could be a problem. This suggests that for any one Windows user account, there is a general track and an incognito track. When you exit Windows altogether, and restart Windows and Chrome, that's when you find out your shopping cart and history have been wiped clean. So the session key Chrome generates for Incognito is apparently only good for the current Windows session, and that's fine. But it still suggests that some session data is being maintained somehow while you're in Incognito mode, and that may not be what you expect.

Sometimes the best software behavior you can have is the kind you expect, regardless of whether it's the most convenient. Firefox erasing your tracks the moment you exit Private Browsing may not always be convenient -- you're covering your tracks, but also destroying anything you've accomplished in the interim. But Firefox says that's what it does, and that's what it does.

When Chrome's Incognito Mode first premiered, there was some concern from users who discovered that even though they used Incognito to log onto Google's services, Google's own Web history remembered their logins. But frankly, that's what users should have expected: You can't tell a server to which you've just logged in to not remember you just because you've opted not to remember it. That may cause an inconvenience for someone who uses Google tools to remember his history, but if he reasons things out in his mind, it's an inconvenience that can be expected and anticipated, and perhaps therefore avoided.

Google suggests that users who really do want their tracks dis-remembered immediately, use the Ctrl+Shift+Delete method (actually pioneered by Firefox) to selectively remove a day's worth of browsing history. Well, if that's the solution to the privacy problem to begin with, then remind me again why we even need Incognito mode?

Firefox's Private Browsing is plain, it's less flexible, and it's actually a little dull. But it does what it says it does and behaves the way one should reasonably expect. That's why I'm judging the victor in Round 1 of this duel to be Firefox 3.5. If Chrome had given me even so much as a warning about not clearing my history yet, or an option to either retain my Incognito history for the duration of the Windows session or not, then I would have scored this one for Chrome.