Chromium

It seems that cookies are shared between incognito windows A and B. This seems undesirable to me.

What do you think should happen if you drag one tab out of Incognito Window A, creating Incognito Window B? And then create a new window, Incognito Window C? Should A + B share cookies and C have a new set?

To be honest, that's what I've always wanted to happen (ala IE's 'new session'), but I feel a lot of users would want some representation of which windows correspond to which, and I suspect the sharing of the session was a deliberate effort to avoid confusion.

A, B, and C should each have different sets of cookies. That, to me, is incognito.

Here is the new Incognito window text description: "You've gone incognito. Pages you view in this window won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. Any files you download or bookmarks you create will be preserved, however."

Based on that text, I would expect that the moment you go incognito (open A, B, or C) then history and cookies are not logged. And when you close the window A they are gone. The problem seems to me to be that opening B before you close A means that you still have the same cookies from A available to B. If that's the case, change the text to read something like this: "You've gone Incognito a second time. You didn't close the first Incognito window so therefore some cookies and history may be shared."

Seems like a hairy problem to try and solve.

A and B not sharing the same cookies could lead to all manner of problems. If B was your Gmail settings page, for instance, you'd need to re-request the page the moment you drag it out from A, and it would just redirect to the login page. And, since we're re-requesting when we drag B out from A, what if it was the result of a POST? Do we resupply the POST vars?

Or, do we not re-request the page as we drag B from A, and simply let further navigation or AJAX requests in B fail due to the absence of cookies? Then we have a sort of shared state going on.

Neither of these seem good in my opinion. As I say, my ideal would be the 'New session' functionality in IE, but with some visual identifier as to the session number.

The critical reason why all Incognito windows share the same cookies is
to allow/promote Chrome's tab drag-off-and-insert-into any other window.

Fundamentally, Chrome does *not* want to keep a different set of cookies per
different Incognito window.  One of Chrome's ease of use and flow features is easily
creating new windows and moving tabs between windows, including new Incognito windows
and moving between Incognito windows.  That's why all Incognito windows must share
one session together.

If one Incognito window has one set of cookies/properties, then
another tab with different cookies/properties cannot be inserted into it.  And I
believe that is one fundamental functionality the Chrome devs are not willing to
restrict.

@mclipsco, your desired functionality will be better served in the upcoming multi-profiles
feature of Chrome.

I can see and appreciate the comments #4 and #5.

First let me address this https://crbug.com/chromium/90153#c4: "If B was your Gmail settings page, for instance, you'd need to re-request the page the moment you drag it out from A, and it would just redirect to the login page."

That's exactly my whole point. I *want* Incognito B to be separate from Incognito A in every sense of the word. Who cares about POST and AJAX requests and all that? It's a NEW Incognito session. To my thinking, Incognito is good for short-term browsing sessions, not long-term usage. I'll have to play with IE (IE 9 is it?) that has the "New Session" functionality to try and understand better what you are talking about.

Regarding this https://crbug.com/chromium/90153#c5: "The critical reason why all Incognito windows share the same cookies is to allow/promote Chrome's tab drag-off-and-insert-into any other window."

As soon as I type Ctrl-Shift-N (or via the menu) a new Incognito window pops up anyway. It's already separate in itself. That's already intuitively physically separate from my main browsing session. I have no desire whatsoever to mix and match normal tabs/windows with Incognito tabs/windows. I already know that Incognito is separate (and being temporarily used) and thus have no willingness to drag and drop them back and forth.

Here's what I normally do, if it helps to explain my usage of Chrome:

1. Load Chrome normally; open a few tabs; browse around; open my personal Gmail and leave it open.

2. Ctrl-Shift-N to open Incognito A check a Google App for Education account; open Google Docs for same account. Occasioanlly edit a few Docs. This means several tabs for Incognito A.

Currently, I need to log out of Google Apps account (or close Incognito A) in order to:

3. Open another Google Apps account: Gmail + Google Docs, etc. multiple tabs on this one as well

It would be nice to have 3 sets of Chrome windows: first window is step 1 above (Gmail + other tabs). Second is Incognito A (Google Apps + associated tabs). Third is Incognito B (another Google Apps + associated tabs). Otherwise, I need to open up Firefox or IE for the 3rd window. And the particular machine I am working on this week has limited RAM and Chrome and Firefox 5 on Windows XP with 1 GB RAM makes things REAL slow.

I'll have to wait and see about this multi-profiles feature. Thanks for all your help and entertaining my thoughts.

@mclipsco, just to point out clearly, the functional constraint of drag-and-drop tabs
is not "mix and match normal tabs/windows with Incognito tabs/windows", but rather
drag-and-drop tabs between two or more Incognito windows.

Specifically, if different Incognito windows have different cookies, an Incognito tab
from one Incognito window could not be drag-and-drop'ed into another Incognito window
(since it would have different cookie values).

You're probably going to say you would never do that, but that's the general drag-and-drop
ability built into Chrome.  And that's a fundamental functionality the Chrome devs are not
willing to restrict (by have separate cookies).

In fact, I believe your desired use case is one of the major reasons for the upcoming multi-profiles.

That is very clear and helpful. Thanks for being so available to respond. I'll have to wait and see about the multi-profiles. Do you happen to know if it is now in the Beta or Dev channels?

[Empty comment from Monorail migration]

Hi, mclipsco -- Profiles are available in canary in a rudimentary form, but this feature is still under heavy development, and the UI in place now will change; I would advise waiting a few weeks before giving it a try.

Thanks for the report.

Incognito windows sharing one set of cookies is a duplicate of 24690

Tracking status of multi-profiles is a duplicate of https://crbug.com/chromium/60105

This issue has been closed for some time. No one will pay attention to new comments.
If you are seeing this bug or have new data, please click New Issue to start a new bug.

[Empty comment from Monorail migration]

This issue was migrated from crbug.com/chromium/90153?no_tracker_redirect=1

[Multiple monorail components: Internals, Internals>Network>Cookies, UI>Browser>Profiles]
[Monorail mergedinto: crbug.com/chromium/24690]
[Monorail components added to Component Tags custom field.]