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I usually do my work in Google Chrome (v36.0.1985.143), private browsing enabled. I use Firefox to browse Stack Exchange, in normal mode so that all my logins are persisted.

Sometimes I accidentally open an SE question in Chrome, so I copy-paste the URL to Firefox and get on reading. I left the SE tab in Chrome open, and up-voted a question in Firefox.

Normally, you immediately see other users' voting activity via socket event emitting (possibly Socket.IO, I don't know SE's back-end). I noticed that in my Chrome tab, I didn't see the upvote that I had cast in Firefox. I had to refresh to be able to see the vote count change.

So, as the title of the question states: does private browsing prevent socket events?

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The easiest way to check this is using the Chrome Web Developer tools(F12) to look at the connections. Here's a screenshot I took from an incognito window:

Screenshot

As you can see, the connection to qa.sockets.stackexchange.com has the response 101 Switching Port, which is the response that gets returned when a Web Sockets connections is negotiated.

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  • I see that now, thanks! Will the request ever come through? It seems to be 'pending' forever. I just did the same in Chrome non-private browsing, and no socket emission. Is it just a Chrome thing?
    – Chris Cirefice
    Aug 22, 2014 at 16:28
  • It should "just work," as you can see its working for me. Are you behind an HTTP proxy or anything that might be disrupting the connection?
    – heavyd
    Aug 22, 2014 at 16:30
  • Well, I'm hard-wired into a university connection, so imagine there are a lot of tunnels to go through to get to the outside, including a proxy or two :P
    – Chris Cirefice
    Aug 22, 2014 at 16:41
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    Yeah, many proxies don't play nicely with Web Sockets since its more than normal HTTP traffic.
    – heavyd
    Aug 22, 2014 at 16:42
  • That would explain why it can't switch ports. Interesting... well that was kind of a let-down! I was hoping that I stumbled upon something a bit more interesting than because my univeristy said so =/
    – Chris Cirefice
    Aug 22, 2014 at 16:43

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