As someone else put it, it's for making sure your wife doesn't get suspicious of the weird ads you're getting, and when she checks the browser history it's clean.
Meanwhile Google, your ISP, and the NSA all know you're looking at freaky old lady bondage porn.
Except some sites seem to use your IP, so if you're both using the same WiFi, you're going to get ads for other party. And for anyone else who used the same WiFi, too
It's handy when you need to make sure that someone else can access a url ok without having to sign in to the website or anything. If you can immediately see the page in incognito mode without signing in, they'll have no problem
I remember having to use an incognito browser for testing at work one time, and it felt very wrong to pull it up on my work laptop instead of the personal laptop.
That's not entirely true. It's only very recently that browsers have started using a new system called Encrypted Client Hello which hides the domain of the request. Prior to this all requests needed too have the Host field unencrypted so the receiving server knows which certified to respond with. I imagine there's still quite a few servers which don't support the new setup still.
Firefox containers is your friend. It's way better. I can sign into dozens of separate pages for different clients in a single browser window in different tabs if I want.
Is that a permanent solution or do I have to set it up every time? I just use profiles. about:profiles there you can setup a new one and launch it in a new window. I like to theme the windows in a different color to not get confused. Bright red is for 18+
FYI most browsers have built-in options for user profiles, so you can have that benefit without the second account on a given website being logged out every time you restart the browser.
incognito is still handy when you’re logging in to a website with a lesser-used second account, though.
Especially when you do this, considering a lot of privacy extensions are disabled by default in incognito mode (at least in FF), so there's less blocking of tracking elements.
(Also, unless you change your DNS provider or use a (proper) VPN, I believe your ISP sees everything no matter what, though I could be wrong about the latter.)
On the other hand, if this is a woosh situation & it's a joke, well, then, eh, I've seen funnier. ¯\_ (•_•) _/¯
This is only true if you set your browser that way. On firefox I have all extensions be able to work in incognito. I believe you can do this on chrome too but I don't use that.
Technically incorrect unless you use http for some weird reason. The ISP can see the domain only, and (afaiu) not even that if encrypted client hello is used. At least kinda: they still see the IP which is not always unique.
Yes, this is why you should use DNS over TLS. My router signal to every DHCP client that it is the DNS resolver, and internally use DoT/dnssec to query IPs. It also intercepts every request on DNS port in case of some DNS are hard-coded on some devices.
DNS over TLS won't save you thanks to SNI. As there is a huge shortage of IPV4 addresses, same IP addresses serve multiple hostnames, and to provide a working encryption, TLS handshake includes the requested hostname in plain text so that SNI can be used to determine which certificate should be used. That plaintext hostname is something your ISP can easily log.
Rule of thumb is, Https does not provide anonymity, only encryption.
Doesn't solve the autocomplete issue when you're trying to show someone something. I also don't get ads for things I searched for while in a private window. And don't forget how useful it is when you're logging into some of your accounts when it's not your machine, or logging into two accounts at once.