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Comment by M4v3R | Hacker News Reader

Well to be honest they don't say that the browser doesn't store your browsing data temporarily. As a matter of fact it has to do that in order to provide you with caching, cookies and local storage for your private browsing session. Normally this data gets wiped out when you close the window, but when the browser crashes it doesn't have chance to do so, so they restore the windows for you so you can make the decision whether to close them or not.

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> As a matter of fact it has to do that in order to provide you with caching, cookies and local storage for your private browsing session.

This is solved by knowing what is stored is private browsing data, which should be marked anyways. Safari just isn't that well thought out of a browser.

> Safari just isn't that well thought out of a browser

Safari is just a browser that has made a different set of tradeoffs.

What tradeoff? Both chrome and Firefox treat private browsing data differently, and if they crash, will not be able to just restore it. Even if they did, its still bad design. The point of private browsing is to make it so when that window exits, that data doesn't exist anymore. You can still pull it up in new tabs in Firefox, but not if the window itself closes.

> The point of private browsing is to make it so when that window exits, that data doesn't exist anymore

Who defined it that way? And how do you define 'exit', 'data' and 'exist'?

What is reality anyway?

Typically in macos, closing windows doesn't quit applications and quitting applications doesn't close windows.

I'm just speculating here, but since macOS/iOS have native APIs that automatically enable state restoration, Safari might be using those instead of reinventing the wheel for cross-platform compatibility like Chrome and Firefox need to.

Leveraging native APIs means less code (fewer bugs), less disk usage, less RAM usage, etc.

>> Both chrome and Firefox treat private browsing data differently

>> The point of private browsing is to make it so when that window exits, that data doesn't exist anymore.

When defining what private browsing is supposed to do we should keep in mind Safari was the first major browser to introduce the feature.

Sure, but it also didn't save/restore any window or tab state at that time. All those features came later, so this represents a change in how things act between Safari versions.

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