Chrome Cache Conundrum

Incognito Oddities? #Incoggities? Yea, that's the ticket!

 
 

Background

Turns out that Chrome incognito cache acts in a way some people might not expect...?  In short, as of now, incog window caches are shared, and persist until all incog windows are closed :\

The screens were better before, but then chrome went and updated and I just didn't get ones as nice this time around... sry :\

Chrome Cache

Starts out relatively clean:

00_clear_cache.png

 

And here we are checking to see if we're up to date:

01_chrome_curr.png

 

Looks like auto-updates gets some stuff in the cache:

02_cache_after_curr_check.png

And if we do a quick 'duck duck go' search, we'll see it added to the cache as expected:

03_cache_after_ddg_search.png

Going Incognito

So when we open two independent incog windows (doesn't seem to matter how we accomplish this), they both start out with blank caches, even though the normal tab cache (background) is preserved, as expected:

04_two_incog_w_no_cache.png

 

But then things get a little weird, because searching in one incog window for a bank ends up affecting the cache of the other incog window:

05_one_shares.png

 

And I guess, as oddly expected, the same things happens in reverse.  When we search for stack overflow in the second window, we see the incog cache in the first incog window gets 'polluted':

06_other_shares.png

 

Ok ok, not a huge deal, but maybe a little unexpected? Not sure what, if any, unforeseen consequences might exist at this point?  

And then it kinda gets odd, because if we fully close one of the two incog windows, and then go back to settings (the new tab in the remaining incog window) and clear every little bit of browser history that Chrome will let us clear, and go back to our incog window we see that not only do the bank  cache items persist (as expected, I guess), but also the StackOverflow cache items from the closed incog window:

Close the second incog window, and clear browser history via the URI chrome://settings/clearBrowserData or whateva

Close the second incog window, and clear browser history via the URI chrome://settings/clearBrowserData or whateva

No old window, but we still have the StackOverflow cache objects?

No old window, but we still have the StackOverflow cache objects?

And a totally new incog window has all the old cache data?

And a totally new incog window has all the old cache data?

WTH Incognito?

So the kinda crazy bit is that the Chrome incog cache clears automagically (with no user action required) once all incog windows are closed:

10_close_all_no_cache.png

Really no idea how this can be expected behavior, or what the IRL ramifications might be.  The first thing that comes to mind that there may be a benefit to opening and hiding an incog window if you want to see what people are trying to hide when they go incognito?  And how does this impact Android, where it seems as tho the OS may be snapshotting memory periodically?

So anyway, if you're paranoid enough to think about stuff like this, maybe just close all your incog windows as you use them one at a time, instead of opening multiple tabs or windows...?