You think so?

While Opera doesn't have a built in private mode (yet?), it is fairly easy to make it behave in a very private way. You have probably noticed the -private command line option listed in opera -help and tried it to see what it does. We had an implementation of private mode internally some time ago which we unfortunately didn't finish, and we forgot to remove this option when we decided not to release it.

But fear not, it is still possible to make Opera behave privately! All you have to do is use a simple wrapper script that sets up a protected and random personal directory (the place opera stores all its user data). I know, "script". It may sound daunting, but it really isn't, as long as you know how to save a file as root, aka "super user".

Running Opera in Private mode is very nice if your PC is borrowed by people you know - simply make them use the Opera Private mode browser, and they don't have to worry about you seeing anything they didn't want you to see.

What it does is quite simple:

1. Define a temporary random name folder to store the data in.
   
2. Set the umask to 0077, which means that all the files will be unreadable to anyone but the one who started Opera
   
3. Insert settings in the opera6.ini file, to prevent you from having to see the licence dialog and the KDE keyboard shortcuts message every time, in addition to setting the Opera title to "Opera Private mode"
   
4. When you exit, the folder will be removed.
   

Thanks to Arve for the initial implementation.

To set it up, fetch the opera private mode wrapper and follow the instructions.

I haven't investigated how this can be done on Windows and Mac, but it should be possible there too. (Please tell me!)