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My computer shut down all pages I had open in Incognito Mode without my prompting. I believe because I had too many windows open at the same time.

Is there a way to find the windows I had open in that Incognito Mode before the computer closed it all down?

Pierre.Vriens
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Gary Smith
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    The point of incognito mode is not making the history. –  Oct 13 '18 at 08:30
  • @GabrielaGarcia While that is true I often find myself in a situation where the right level of privacy for my needs is somewhere between that of a normal browser window and that of an incognito window. Often what I want is that cookies aren't persisted and aren't tied to my normal browsing, but I still want open tabs persisted across restarts and I want recent URLs to be completed as I am typing. – kasperd Oct 13 '18 at 13:42
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    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/. You can achieve a similar effect in Chrome with multiple profiles, I believe. Using private/incognito for that purpose will lose tabs on close/crash/restart, by design. – Bob Oct 13 '18 at 15:10
  • @kasperd Maybe guest mode or an alternative user profile would suit your needs better. – Wes Toleman Oct 14 '18 at 01:39

2 Answers2

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By design of Incognito, there is NO (repeat: NO) way to "find the windows I had open in that Incognito Mode before the computer closed it all down" (as in your question).

And if anybody knows some sort of work around for it, then that is to be considered as a bug ... which has become a feature.

Note: I'm assuming that you're looking for the complete URLs of each of those windows you had open. In that case, IMO running the cmd ipconfig/displaydns on a Windows PC (as suggested in the other answer to this question) does not seem to fully answer your question.

As a sample, just pick a random link, such as this new site proposal (disclosure: it's a proposal I endorse ... just pick any link you prefer to do a similar experiment). Then verify the results you get from the above command. Does it include the complete URL? FYI: not in my verification I just did. At best you get the domain name, but not the entire URL. Here is the relevant part of the result I got (which does not include the complete URL of the sample I mentioned above ...):

 area51.stackexchange.com
 ----------------------------------------
 Record Name . . . . . : area51.stackexchange.com
 Record Type . . . . . : 1
 Time To Live  . . . . : 278
 Data Length . . . . . : 4
 Section . . . . . . . : Answer
 A (Host) Record . . . : 151.101.1.69
Pierre.Vriens
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Your Best Solution - Use IPConfig /DisplayDNS

A PC keeps a list of all websites visited, even those visited in Incognito modes. Just like an ISP records all your browsing history, so does your PC to some degree via DNS Cache.

How to Retrieve Your Browsing History

The following command not only works for Google incognito but also for all private browsers such as InPrivate browsing in IE and privatewindow in Firefox.

This will list the website and IP for every site you have visited.

Like This:

  1. Open RUN by pressing WIN + R (on your windows pc)

  2. Type CMD and press ok

  3. Type the following ipconfig /displaydns then press enter.

Find Out Which Sites Users Have Accessed In Private Browsing Modes

Private browsing is a relative new feature that allows users to hide their web activities. The mode blocks that browsing session data os stored in the browser or on the computer's hard drive. This for instance means that no data is written to the cache or the cookie storage.

Users naturally feel safer using that mode, but that should not be the case. Why? Because there are means to find out which sites have been accessed in private browsing mode locally.

You see, one feature of the Windows operating system is a DNS cache, that stores domain name and IP links. Without going into to much details, the DNS cache records information about every website that the user opens in a web browser in Windows.

Curious Windows users just need to list the contents of the DNS cache to find out what websites a user has been visiting in private browsing mode. It may require some additional comparison to find the private browsing mode websites, but that requires just some manual work and can be neglected.

I say Reinstate Monica
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Electron
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    You could also check the gateway/firewall logs, if you [or your IT department ] have access. – Tetsujin Oct 13 '18 at 11:12
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    Why do I get the impression, these answers are scaring a lot of people right now, hehe! – Electron Oct 13 '18 at 11:13
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    hehe, yup. I can track every user & where they've been for the past 6 months [I don't, but I could - the information is available to me in the gateway logs, even if they use our VPN.] – Tetsujin Oct 13 '18 at 11:15
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    But the dns cache only shows the particular *site*, not the individual URLs. This may or may not make a difference, like if you're trying to figure out specific searches or files the user viewed. – phyrfox Oct 13 '18 at 13:46
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    I agree with @phyrfox 's prior comment ... Check my updated answer to better understand why. – Pierre.Vriens Oct 13 '18 at 14:54
  • DNS cache only includes the hostname (as already noted) AND only until the TTL expires, which nowadays is rarely more than a few minutes. – dave_thompson_085 Oct 15 '18 at 04:15