Re: But How ?
Here's what I've been doing... it requires Linux or FreeBSD to work properly though
a) normal browsing [including posts to El Reg] has NoScript plugin running in as restrictive a mode as I can manage for normal things. Fortunately, even Amazon usually works in this mode [I white-listed one or two of their things though]. [amazon seems to track itself, not others, so kudos for that]
b) For everything ELSE, I 'su - differentuser' and then 'export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0'. Since I'm listening on TCP port 6000 with the X server [not hard to set it up that way, but I don't wanna repeat myself with full instructions, just make sure you do NOT use '-nolisten tcp' in the X server command line and block external incoming connections on port 6000] i can THEN run Firefox as a different user's context, ON THE LOGGED IN DESKTOP. Easily. And it even plays videos properly!
c) in the 'differentuser' context, Firefox is configured to automatically DELETE ALL HISTORY AND CACHE whenever I close it. I have NOT figured out how to do that with chrome, but you can always delete its entire cache directory yourself and ONLY run chrome with a shell script that does this for you... [and the cache stuff is always in the logged-in user's /home directory so it only affects that user]
d) with FULL awareness of this I do not surf from site to site unless I don't care if site 'A' tracks me looking at site 'B'. If it's all on the same set of servers, who cares. If Faece-book (for example) is tracking me surfing the New York Times web site (for example) then I'll view them with separate browser sessions, so that no cookie/history/cache exists when I open up the NYT site. [an El Reg article from a while ago suggested that even cached vs uncachedd pages CAN track where you've been...]
Sure, my IP address will be known. Ideally it won't be traced back to me. But it could. So the next step would be Tor or a VPN. But for now, what I described is "secure enough" for me.
And THIS way, I can STILL view those sites that _INSIST_ I promiscuously allow javascript... and then I exit the browser and ALL of their tracking B.S. goes byebye!
Not sure what Firefox's 'private browsing' does but I expect it's LESS than what I just described.