![]() ![]() If you get a positive detection on all of them, it seems more likely that your user is private browsing. I'm not sure how to probe for downloads, but I think the others can be probed. The aspects of private browsing are (at least in Firefox): history, form/search entries, passwords, downloads, cookies, cache, DOM storage. I'm specifying that the user has an account, because this strategy relies on tracking various bits of behavior data. Let's assume you operate a web application, and you want to detect when one of your users (with an account) switches to private browsing. As Sonny Ordell mentioned, I'm also not sure that you can distinguish private browsing from the ad hoc use of various privace-enhancing features (e.g. As indicated in my comment on the question, whether this is good enough or fits your application depends on what you want to be able to do in reaction to detecting private browsing. I'm not sure you could reliably detect private browsing, but I think you may be able to apply some heuristics to make a good guess that a user is using various privacy-enhancing features. Please see one of the good current answers below 1 2 for more up to date information. Today the answer is an unequivocal YES - as of this writing in 2020 there are reliable techniques in wide use and have been for a while. So, can anyone provide any more recent information about whether there's a way for a website to test whether its visitors are using private browsing mode? It is also possible that this might not work at all. It is possible this might yield a partial leak of information, I suppose, but it sounds unreliable at best - if it even works. However, if the user isn't logged into other services, then I guess all we can say is that we don't know whether private browsing mode is in use. If the user is currently logged into other services (like Facebook), a website could plausibly guess that the user is not currently using private browsing mode - this is not a sure thing, but perhaps one could make some kind of probabilistic inference. There may be ways for a website you're visiting to learn whether you are currently logged into other sites (think: Facebook). (I realize the defenses against history sniffing are not perfect, but they may be good enough for these purposes.) (In private browsing mode, sites are not added to the history, so you can use history sniffing to check whether the visitor is in private browsing mode.) Since then, though, modern browsers have incorporated defenses against CSS history sniffing attacks.Ĭonsequently, I would not expect that method of detecting whether the browser is in private browsing mode to be successful any longer. Unfortunately, it doesn't really answer the question above.Ī 2010 study of private browsing mode showed that it is possible for web sites to detect whether the browser is in private browsing mode, by using a CSS history sniffing attack. Here's what I've been able to find related to this question. In modern browsers, can a web site detect whether a user who is visiting the web site has private browsing mode enabled or not? When a menu pops up, right-click on the words “Microsoft Edge,” then select “Properties.Most modern browsers support " private browsing mode" (also known in Chrome as "Incognito mode"), where the browser does not save any information to disk about your browsing while in this mode. For example, if you have the Edge icon pinned to your taskbar, right-click on it. It may be on the Start Menu, the Desktop, or on your taskbar. While that may seem intimidating, it’s not as hard as it sounds.įirst, find the shortcut you use to launch Edge. To launch Edge already in InPrivate mode, we need to change a command-line option in a shortcut that launches Edge. RELATED: How Private Browsing Works, and Why It Doesn't Offer Complete Privacy How to Always Start Microsoft Edge in InPrivate Mode on Windows 10 Websites, your ISP, or organizations hosting your network (such as your school or office) can still see your web activity by tracking your IP address or through other methods. However, InPrivate does not prevent tracking your activity across the Iinternet. ![]() It also prevents Bing searches from being associated with your Microsoft account. Your bookmarks and downloaded files will be preserved unless you delete those manually. While using InPrivate, Edge deletes your local browsing history when you close all browser windows. ![]() InPrivate is the name of Microsoft Edge’s private browsing mode. ![]()
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