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by flxmglrb 4942 days ago
> Not to mention that iPads don't really have any private browsing mode.

Safari on iOS certainly does have "private browsing". Just go to the Settings app and select "Safari" from the top level and it's the first setting under the "Privacy" (just below the "General" section). When it's enabled, the browser looks different to let you know -- the normally gray bezel UI becomes black. This has been a feature ever since iOS 5.0 was released in 2011.

More info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1677
1 comments
chiph 4941 days ago
I just tried Panopticlick both before and after enabling private browsing in Safari (Mac OS X) and the site identified the same number of identifiable pieces of information about me. So it looks like that has no effect.

Which sort of makes sense - the info it's looking at is basically the header info. Screen size, installed fonts, IP address, and so on. It's not relying on cookies, as cookies can't be seen/read across domains (you can't tell I'm an Amazon customer if I just visit you out of the blue).

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justincormack 4941 days ago
You used to be able to by reading back CSS styles of visited links. May be fixed now. http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2010/03/mozilla-to-modify-how-...
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cynwoody 4940 days ago
It is fixed.

CSS may color visited links red, but they hacked getComputedStyle to return the normal color instead. So, you can't tell if that link to Amazon you just created is visited or not.

And you can no longer set, for example, font-weight:bold for visited links, because that would change the size of the element, and they decided, unlike in the color case, that it would be too complicated to get all the APIs to lie about the new geometry.

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justincormack 4939 days ago
Is it fixed in all browsers?
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