Be careful, your understanding of incognito mode in Firefox may be wrong and that could be costing you
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
Maybe it's because I have a programmer mentality but this is exactly the behavior I would expect, otherwise the "open link in new window"won't work reliably, all popups would fail and you couldn't "tear" off a tab in a new window
Though I must say as a dev, being able to use 3 different safari windows for 3 different accounts to test is wonderful, instead of needing multiple browsers.
For me that behavior was expected. E.g. if I open a link from incognito in a new window, then it obviously should also use incognito but share its context with the previous sessions, otherwise it would require you to login over and over again. If an independently opened incognito window behaved different from a link-click window, I'd find it even more confusing.
In fact, that's a good way to understand the behavior. Log into a site. Visit the site in your other window. If they share a session, you'll be logged in. If they don't, you'll be logged out.
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.
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
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).
I think what you are looking for is Containers. FF uses containers to wall things off from each other, whereas Private sessions are still all sandboxed together, as you discovered. I know this is quite different from how Safari, for example, handles things, but you can accomplish the same things, just a little differently.
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.
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 can confirm that this is the case with Microsoft Edge (I know, I know, it's required for work), which is Chromium-based, so I would be very surprised if Chrome differs significantly in this.
As a "I just care somewhat about privacy because the NSA sees everything anyway" guy... How the fuck are you all using your browsers and for what? HOW can this lack of knowledge cost anyone anything?
One example of being more careful about privacy that came up for me recently is that I have gmail as my primary mail and I use google docs for storing a lot of things I use for work. If I also want to block youtube ads and they say it's against their TOS, they can theoretically close my gmail and docs for violating it.
They might not and I haven't necessarily seen anything saying they're moving in that direction, but since last month I've been exclusively watching yt either through proxy sites and apps or opening it in incog windows where I'm logged out.
Privacy used to be just for people who have something to hide but thats 2012. These days you will have more problems that pop out of nowhere if you dont care about privacy and most of them arent even related to your data being stolen or something.
As a functional human being you need to have balance in everything. You need privacy but you also need to eat. And your need to eat is greater than your need to privacy.
A strange thing though, have you not tried uBlock Origin? I have been using uBlock Origin and I dont think I ever saw any ads issues on Youtube.
Either way, log out of Google services when you dont need it. Only use Incognito browsing mode because it gets cleared automatically.
firefox profiles have a bad UX in my experience. The Multi-Account Containers addon works better. There's also Facebook Container, which uses the multi-account containers addon.