Pale Moon forum

i was wondering what effect using the "new private window" has in PM. is there any effect other than
deleting history and cookies when you close it? how about tracking...any effect? thanks., just dont know.

Private Browsing creates a temporary environment for you to work in. When you close the window, everything you did in it (except downloaded files, of course) will be thrown away.

It provides "local" privacy. After you close the private window, there will be no trace of what you've visited in the browser profile.
It does not provide any privacy on the Internet side of things. Trackers can still track you, and data stored on remote servers will obviously not be erased when you close the window. It may confuse some trackers, depending on how they are set up and if they use local storage (e.g. cookies) to track you or not, but you shouldn't count on this being commonplace.

ah, thank you ...even i can understand now...hahah

For some reason I do not have Private Browsing Mode. When I select the "open private browsing window" option, a normal window open up. I have verified this by logging into gmail in a normal window, then opening a private session and seeing if I need to log in. Sure enough, I'm already logged in when I checked the private browsing session. I'm using version 27.3 (64-bit).

You're trying to look at it the wrong way.

Opening a private browsing window doesn't "throw away" what you already have in your normal session. It doesn't create a "blank environment", but adopts all settings and cookies from normal operation -- otherwise it would be extremely inconvenient to use. So it's correct that you are automatically logged in in that case, but any evidence of what you are doing while in that private session will not be retained (on the browser side, anyway. Google will of course still know you logged in and looked at your mail).

To illustrate the other side: if you would log out in your normal session, then log in when in a private session, and close the private window, you won't be logged in in your normal session (there's no evidence that you used gmail in the private window).

EDIT: I made some mistakes here, sorry about that. see below.

Moonchild wrote:Opening a private browsing window doesn't "throw away" what you already have in your normal session. It doesn't create a "blank environment", but adopts all settings and cookies from normal operation

Probably I'm missing something, but this contradicts all my experience of using the private browsing mode

You are absolutely correct, JustOff! My mistake.

It does throw away all session cookies and doesn't adopt them in the private window. So yes, you WILL get logged out from gmail by opening a private window -- contrary to what jyro275 states. It's not a fully blank slate, though, but normal logged in sessions should not be persistent across switching to a private window in most cases.
So.. I'm not sure why you remain logged in when opening a private window, because you should not. At least not in our current release versions of Pale Moon

Moonchild wrote:You are absolutely correct, JustOff! My mistake.

It does throw away all session cookies and doesn't adopt them in the private window. So yes, you WILL get logged out from gmail by opening a private window -- contrary to what jyro275 states. It's not a fully blank slate, though, but normal logged in sessions should not be persistent across switching to a private window in most cases.
So.. I'm not sure why you remain logged in when opening a private window, because you should not. At least not in our current release versions of Pale Moon

Is it possible that it's the theme I'm using? When I select new private window from the menu, I don't receive the normal "Pale Moon won't remember any history for this window" box. It works as it should on my other computer though.