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Be careful, your understanding of incognito mode in Firefox may be wrong and that could be costing you (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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All the incognito browser windows share the same "session" in Firefox. So say you open an Incognito window to browse Facebook or something, then you open another Incognito window, this new incognito window is linked to the previous incognito window, meaning you are logged into Facebook at that new Incognito window as well. This is because, as I explained before, all the incognito windows share the same "session"

The only way to clear incognito window is to close ALL of them and then create a new incognito window. You dont have to close the main non incognito Firefox window though, just close all the incognito windows. Then open a new one, now your previous session is destroyed and you are new again.

You may know it but its not that common knowledge as it should have been

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

seems counter intuitive.. each incognito window should be separated into their containers.

seems like a good idea to take that container addon and apply that to incognito.

[+] sock -20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

why would you expect each tab connected to the same window to each have a different cache or whatever as if it wasnt connected to the same window.

it seems counterintuitive to expect that.

unless yall mean opening up multiple windows then i ask what r u using incognito for so much. nobody cares about you or your data in any significant way thatll affect you.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

No not tabs sharing data but windows sharing data is unintuitive

[–] NickNak 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's an add on that lets you create custom containers, a container acts as it's own session in a way, content, cache, cookies etc are all localised to one container

For example, you open youtube in one then open gmail in another container, neither one will know you're logged into the other

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yup, I use the multi-account containers addon and have one for work, one for personal, one for banking stuff, one for shopping, etc. You can have websites locked to a given container, or you can choose each time you open a link.

However, that's a completely separate concept from private tabs. With private tabs, once you close the last private tab, your entire session is cleared.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You can move tabs between windows, so either you need to go with each tab is a separate container, or all private mode windows share a container.

Perhaps it makes sense to have multiple private browsing windows and label them to make it obvious? Or just eliminate private mode and just use containers for it with a setting for each container for which addons work with that container.

All of that seems complicated, so I prefer to just keep it simple. I use containers to separate concerns/accounts, and private browsing if I want to ensure browsing history isn't tracked (esp. useful when searching for Christmas/birthday gifts).