Be careful, your understanding of incognito mode in Firefox may be wrong and that could be costing you

cy_narrator@discuss.tchncs.de to Firefox@lemmy.ml – 446 points –

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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Why would you ever sign into anything in incognito mode. Doesn't that pretty much defeat the whole purpose?

There are legitimate reasons. You may have a main account in a given page which you usually want to log into automatically, but at certain occasions you might want to use an alt without your browser forgetting to log into your main by default. A more specific example of this would be someone who has an alt account for NSFW stuff in social media because they want to be able to browse in their main without risk of genitals popping up on their screen while they're on the bus or using the phone next to family.

I use it when I need to log into a computer at work with a personal account, so that I know I'm logged out when I close the window.

I use it to test that I've set up an authentication system correctly without a cookie bias, among other uses

Set everything up in main > confirm tests pass > log in from incognito with password vault to make sure the auto test didn't lie.

anonymity is not the only usage for incognito, and frankly it doesn’t even make you very anonymous on its own

Logging into alt accounts without logging out of main

Thankfully I have a life, so I don't feel the need.

Signing in to a service would defeat incognito mode if its function were to make you incognito towards the websites you visit.

But since that's not what it does, I don't see why it would defeat anything.

My health and dental insurance are through the same company but on different accounts (they refuse to combine them), so I use a private tab to sign into both at the same time because it normally only allows one at a time.

I had that issue with two services two, but I've taken to using different containers now.

Exactly because I want to log out of everything when I close my browser