Serious Google Chrome privacy bug

[Grall]

Sites you visit in a supposedly "incognito" window still appears in the history sidebar in the windows7 start menu after a recent invisible auto-update of Chrome.

Anyone else noticed this and found out how to put a stop to it?

I've never seen this mentioned anywhere else, and it's been days now since I first noticed this happening.

 

[N00b]

Simply stop visiting p*rn sites. Problem solved!

 

[doob]

Consider trying the alternative chrome based SRware iron, claimed to have better privacy handling.

 

[Grall]

Simply stop visiting p*rn sites. Problem solved!

I suppose you're just trying to be funny, but I'm the only one using this PC, so this issue doesn't really affect ME. I'm just trying to find out how widespread this issue is.

Instead of offering me workarounds (don't visit those sites, use another browser, etc...), please, just try to answer the questions I asked in the OP, okay?

 

[Albuquerque]

Right-click, remove from list?

 

[Arwin]

I can't reproduce this. I tried opening an incognito window, open the nytimes homepage (hadn't opened that ever on this machine in Chrome I think), and then closed it again. It does not appear anywhere, including not in the recently closed.

 

[Grall]

Right-click, remove from list?

That does work (I just tested it), but since it's not supposed to show up there in the first place it's kind of backwards...

I use chrome only for a few sites, and incognito not for privacy reasons but to stop the browser from cluttering up my SSD with temporary cache files. Since moving the cache requires major hacking of the registry it's simply easier to do it this way I feel.

 

[Davros]

I think it was alby who did a post about how to move browser cache/temp files/swap file ect to a ramdrive to save on ssd wear

 

[Albuquerque]

Yeah, it requires a bit of registry change, but not a significant amount. It's a pretty clear case of find -> replace. I've had absolute success with telling Chrome to use my ramdrive as it's temp location.

 

[Rodéric]

I did it with hardlinks and it works just fine, no registry hack, although I had to use the command line to create the hard links.

Also did that to save my SSD, what's stupid is that we have to do that, why do we have temp files when we have plenty of memory ?

 

[Grall]

Hm! As suddenly as chrome started doing this, the issue is now gone again... Tested it a couple times, and visited sites don't show up in the start menu anymore. Weird. (Not that I complain, though! )

Dunno if yet another new version was pushed out that plugged up this bughole, or if it was just some freakishly odd glitch that caused it to happen in the first place, like the alarm on iphones not working on certain dates and so on...

 

[Albuquerque]

I did it with hardlinks and it works just fine, no registry hack, although I had to use the command line to create the hard links.

Also did that to save my SSD, what's stupid is that we have to do that, why do we have temp files when we have plenty of memory ?

The hard links are fine if you always instantiate the browser via that link, but URLs that launch through the HTML or whatever other association will not respect your settings. That's why I ended up doing the search-and-destroy in the registry, so that my temp files always end up in the ramdrive even if I invoke the browser through an association.

A more pertinent question for me was Why does chrome make you go through the nonsense of a command-line option (and a rather difficult one to find at that) to do this change? IE and Firefox both allow you to make that change through their options menus.

 

[Grall]

I assume it's because Google doesn't want to clutter the settings menu with a lot of options, most of which are going to be very obscure and difficult to find/understand for most people out there (like with IE...uuurrrrggghh.)

Perhaps they feel it's such an uncommon need to move the default cache location that it doesn't need to be implemented as a setting in the program itself. I do wish they'd reconsider though...

 

[Rodéric]

The hard links are fine if you always instantiate the browser via that link, but URLs that launch through the HTML or whatever other association will not respect your settings. That's why I ended up doing the search-and-destroy in the registry, so that my temp files always end up in the ramdrive even if I invoke the browser through an association.

A more pertinent question for me was Why does chrome make you go through the nonsense of a command-line option (and a rather difficult one to find at that) to do this change? IE and Firefox both allow you to make that change through their options menus.

Oh ?
I modified Chrome folders themselves and replaced them by hardlinks to my RAMDrive...

As for changing that easily, I'd prefer not to have any temporary files and my memory to be used, rather than having to change something that I believe shouldn't exist to begin with.
(ie problem solved rather than a work around)

 

[Mize]

Hard links should work fine...the files are actually on the other drive (in my case it's a spinning drive not a ramdrive) so when the app, launched from any route, goes to look for that directory it gets redirected by the hard link. There's no added command-line option. ABQ is thinking of another route described on various pages, not hard linking.