What does incognito mode do?

Incognito mode allows you to surf the web as if you were a new visitor to every website you land on. When you are in incognito mode, every website you visit will assume you have never visited their site before, meaning there will be no saved cookies, login details or auto-fill web forms waiting for you.

Being incognito means you won't get a personalised web experience based on your browsing habits, so for example the price of flights and other high value items won't increase as you search more often.

However, if you are logged into your personal account in incognito mode, your data will be stored for the duration of the session. If you leave the site, it will not be stored, but it will help websites and advertisers collect identifying data when you are logged in.

After opening incognito in Chrome, but before you start browsing, you can choose to enable third-party cookies that would otherwise be blocked by default. Allowing Chrome to block these cookies in incognito mode means you will see fewer targeted ads, but this may affect the functionality of the websites you visit.

Depending on your browser's privacy settings, opening a new incognito window when you already have one open may not start a second session. safari treats each private window and tab as a new session, but each open incognito window in Chrome belongs to the same session - when all open incognito windows are closed, or when you exit from an open window the session ends when all open incognito windows are closed, or when you exit incognito mode from an open window.

To help you keep track of individual incognito windows, the number of windows you have open at any one time is shown in the top right-hand corner of each window.