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Comment by Vinnl | Hacker News Reader

Pretty off-topic, but:

> When we invented Private Browsing back in 2005, our aim was to provide users with an easy way to keep their browsing private from anyone who shared the same device.

I wonder if anyone actually involved 19 years ago was also involved in writing this piece, or if it just sounded reasonable to whoever drafted it up.

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Apple has a corporate writing/speech style guide that they adhere to religiously. Anything done by anyone in the company present or past is always “we”. Notice how all their keynotes and product press releases almost always include the sentence “we think you’re gonna love it”?

Sorry, I was mostly referring to the fact that they claim to know what the aim was when introducing the feature, even though they might not have been there. Pure curiosity.

It's stylistically typical in English for someone writing on behalf of an organization to use "we" to refer to the organization in its entirety, not to the individual or individuals doing the writing - so in something such as this, "we" is indeed appropriate as Apple the company definitely was there when they released Private Browsing back in 2005.

Which was the question the original comment was about - even though they used "we" to refer to Apple, were the actual writer(s) around back then?

It's an interesting question to me because their tone is speaking from experience but is it the authors experience or Apple?

I care a lot more if it's the actual author, a human, over Apple, a brainless corporation.

And if it's Apple's experience, how did the writer know? Does Apple have that strong of an institutional memory, or were they just assuming?

I gather this sentence sounds unreasonable to you. Why? Were they not the first to ship private browsing mode?

Oh no, I didn't mean at all to say it was unreasonable. I meant that the paragraph claims to know what the aim was when introducing the feature, so I wondered if they actually knew that, or just guessed that that was the aim (because it sounds reasonable that it was).

Clearly I misunderstood you. Thanks for clarifying it!

I wasn't involved in the internal discussion 19 years ago, but definitely remember the feature being considered to be for the purpose you cited. I also remember telling classmates that you can use it for logging in to two accounts at the same time on the site we were developing to have an easier time demoing it to the teachers, and getting jokes about "gee you're awfully familiar with the private browsing feature", from which I'd say it was (1) news to people that it also worked the other way around (website doesn't recognise you) because it was worth bringing up, and (2) people demonstrated knowing it's for not leaving the browser history full of NSFW content—and buying gifts for your partner or parent, of course

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