Sunday, September 17, 2006

Browser Cache

Slashdot | Tracking Users Via the Browser's Cache:

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After reading the above article I thought I'd change the browser settings so that I had not cache. I figured out I could set the disk space a browser allocates for cache to zero or something. I've switched to using Camino over the past few days, since its a lot faster than Firefox. I couldn't find an option to set the cache size or any other such option any where. All I found was a button that allows you to empty your cache.

I couldn't find an option to not cache web pages on safari either, but safari did have an empty cache option, and a private browsing option. The private browsing option doesn't add info of the web site you are visiting to for instance your history. However, it doesn't say if it stops a web page from being cached.

Their is an option of Firefox which by default was set to 50MB on my machine. If you go to about:config, and search for cache, their are two entries that seemed interesting to me. browser.cache.disk.capacity and browser.cache.disk.enable. I had already changed the cache size to 0, and I toggled the boolean value of browser.cache.disk.enable to false. I figured it would be a fun experiment to see how the browser reacts with this cache disabled, and how frustrating usage gets if at all.

Mozilla and hypocrisy

Right, but what about the experiences that Mozilla chooses to default for users like switching to  Yahoo and making that the default upon ...