Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xvector 661 days ago
I think this is a tech literacy problem, honestly. Lots of people don't understand the local/remote boundary. To us it's obvious, clear as night and day.
2 comments

It might be caused by tech illiteracy, but at some point we have to think: A big enough chunk of the population just reads the name of things, not the description, that this becomes a problem.

Ok, maybe users are idiots. But we can either fix all of society, or… just don’t pick names like “incognito mode” or “autopilot” that require a paragraph to correct users expectations.

I agree, that being said I wonder what a good name would be.

Private? Other browsers also use this name, but regardless this isn't any more private than any other browser instance.

Container? Way too techno mumbo jumbo.

No Cache? Even worse pig latin.

Boxed? It's layman speak, but it doesn't convey the cacheless nature.

Forget It? No Memory? Amnesia? Cacheless to be sure, but also still open to misinterpretation.

This is an interesting exercise.

Amnesia mode seems best if we need a mode.

Or a toggle called keep/pause website history. IMO making it a “mode” makes it seem more significant than it really is.

If it were a different web browser, then I would agree, but I feel that kind of confusion is actually just the other side of the coin for something these large companies have very deliberately gone out of their way to create and promote through branding and feature design.

When they purposefully blur the lines between products or sub-companies to create The Google Everything, it isn't fair to let them reap the rewards of confusion while evading its costs.