Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

Private Browsing
Another way to protect your information when browsing is to utilize the Private Browsing feature
of Safari. When Private Browsing is enabled (by selecting Private Browsing... from the Safari
menu), Safari will not save any of your browsing activity in the browser history or cache. This
assures that people can’t go into you computer and poke around at places you’ve been and items
you’ve been browsing.
CAUTION Private Browsing may overlook items in your Downloads window, specifically any
canceled or incomplete downloads.
Cookies
HTTP is a stateless protocol, so when you connect to a web site, there are complications in carrying
out complex transactions, since the protocol doesn’t keep track of one particular user vs.
any other user. There are, of course, many ways to work around this, but the most popular
method today is to use a cookie to keep track of session data as well as other data (web site preferences
and other information can be stored in cookies as well). As such, cookies are an
important part of using the Web today, and while you can disable them, you will be losing out on
a great deal of web functionality doing so.
NOTE Since cookies became popular, there has been a large amount of paranoia about them,
most of which is unfounded. Cookies can track your movement around a web site, and they
can contain personal information, but a cookie is only valid for the originating web site, so any
personal data stored in the cookie is data that you willingly submitted to that web site to begin
with. That said, you may not want to leave cookies lying around on a computer in a user
account that others have access to—but beyond that, they are perfectly safe and make the
Web a much more interesting place to visit. Like plug-ins and so many other computing features,
it comes down to a security vs. ease issue.
Safari has a number of options available to you regarding the accepting of cookies. In the
Security tab of Safari’s Preference window, you select when you wish to accept cookies: never,
always, or only from sites you navigate to (which is the default and most sensible option). Additionally,
the Show Cookies button will open up a window providing information about each
cookie you have stored in your system. This view will also allow you to selectively remove individual
cookies, or if you’d like remove them all.
Emptying the Browser Cache
CHAPTER 10 BROWSING THE WEB WITH SAFARI 189
The browser cache stores most of the content you encounter on the Web locally to help improve
the browser’s response time when revisiting a web site. While this is fantastic from a performance
point of view, you might not want to leave all the items you were browsing lying around in
your computer, as they may contain sensitive or private information (they can also take up a
good amount of disk space, although that’s not as big of a problem today as it was a few years
ago). Either way, you may wish to occasionally empty you browser cache. To do this, just select
the Empty Cache... item from the Safari menu or use the Option+Cmd+E keyboard shortcut.
This will open up a dialog to confirm you want to empty the cache. Click the Empty button to
empty it.