Google Chrome has a great feature,
incognito
mode. Press Ctrl-Shift-N or select Wrench / New incognito window and
you get a browser window with no state. No cookies, no cache, no browser
history, no addons, nothing loaded before the page and nothing saved
after. (
Firefox,
Safari,
and
IE
can do this too).
This mode is half-jokingly called "porn mode", but I find it very useful
as a software developer. Some ways I use it:
- Testing links before sending them out. Check whether the link you're
about to send your friend gives them the same page you see or if the
page requires a login or cookie to look as intended.
- Debugging Javascript. Chrome extensions confuse Javascript
debugging; the scripts show up in the developer console and you never
can be sure whether some addon is modifying things. Incognito mode loads
no extensions unless you explicitly enable one.
- Bypassing caching. It's hard to test a webapp reliably, particularly
for performance, when so many of the assets in the page may be cached. A
new incognito window starts with no cache. The window seems to keep a
memory cache, so you can also test your caching behaviour after the
initial clean load.
Porn mode was invented for browsers to not
store state after
ending a session. But I find I mostly use it to not
load state
before starting a session.