With the recent beta release of Google’s new browser “Chrome”, there has been a heated battle between browsers once again. The players – Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), which has been passing around in alpha mode for a few months now, Mozilla’s Firefox 3 (FF), Apple’s Safari, and the new contender Google’s Chrome. I’m going to ignore all the performance perspectives, or even the debates on how shiny one is over the other, or how simple / complex any which one is or isn’t. Today, I’m going to focus on “privacy”, as I’m hoping you would have guessed from the title.

Each browser brings a different flavor of cake to the party. IE8, Chrome, and Safari are the only ones that bring something by default, but FF makes up with its plethora of extensions.

So what are these flavors exactly?

IE8′s privacy feature is being coined as “InPrivate” mode, Chrome has “Incognito”, Safari being the first to the market with its “private browse” option, and FF brings up the tail end with a newly available extension, “Stealther”.

So what’s the point of these new features?

The general intention of this feature, regardless of whose fancy name you’re using, is simply to clear out private data (cookies, browser history, cache, saved form data) from one’s session. This is mostly referred to in the context of a shared computer so that other users can’t find out what you’ve been doing. I like to look at it more in the sense of not what other users can/can’t see, but software. I’m talking about viruses, spyware, adware, malware, etc.

The rise of spyware and malware specifically has skyrocketed in the past few years. As more people become connected and the sharing of content continues to grow, this epidemic of “bad”-ware isn’t going to slow down. We’ve been preaching safe and secure browsing habits for a while now, but now that the browser makers themselves have stepped up, it really doesn’t matter who wins the battle in the end. It’s a win for everyone in my eyes.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 2:37 pm by Tim Donaworth and is filed under Technology & Tool Thursday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.