Re: Automatic private browsing upgrades

On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 6:33 AM, Francois Marier <francois@mozilla.com>
wrote:
>
> > Would we need to offer a "Clear the last X minutes of browsing history!"
> > feature to websites?
>
> It would probably need to be part of the solution, yes.
>
> I can imagine a user agent prompting the user with something like:
>
>     The site example.com suggests that you open it in a new
>     (private|incognito) window. Would you like to do so and<
>     erase the last 5 minutes of web browsing?
>
>                                             [Yes] [No]
>
> Of course, there are lots of details to figure out, but it seems like we
> could reuse the Ctrl+Shift+Del way of deleting history+cache from the
> past hour that both Chrome and Firefox have.
>

That seems like a capability that's somewhat ripe for abuse, and it's not
clear that "history" is the only problem. For instance, if I'm signed into
Google, my search history is part of my user profile, and influences the
kinds of results I see in the future. That's not something that the browser
has direct control over.

I think this piece of the puzzle needs more thought.

It does feel like a different mechanism (and certainly implementation)
> from the clear-site-data spec, but very similar in spirit. Mike, is that
> something you'd prefer to explore in a different spec?


I agree that there's some overlap in the concepts, but I think they're
distinct enough to sit in different documents. If it turns out that they're
really the same thing (and we want to do both), I'd be happy to combine
them later.

-mike