Have been back to macOS after many years now. After I saw the recent reviews of M1-Chip based MacBooks, I was tempted to buy on. Also, needed a personal laptop after a couple of years sticking to just iPad Pro w/ Magic Keyboard for so long. You can read about my purchasing decision and experience here and here.
Anyway, back to the story. Even on my iPad, I usually browse incognito/private. And then there are certain things which I prefer staying logged on (such as gmail/amazon) and so I have another set of browser tabs in normal mode (non-private).
So, naturally I started doing the same on my macOS. I have one window instance which a bunch of private tabs and a second window instance which a set of normal tabs for mail, amazon etc.
Now sometimes I get confused as to which set of tabs are private and which are not. Unlike Firefox and Chrome which have some UI element which indicates if you are in private mode or not. In Firefox, you have this mask icon on the top left which glows purple (at least on iPadOS) and Chrome shows the private tabs in a black theme. For some reason I am unable to see any (obvious) UI design elements which indicate private browsing. Looking for tips: But if you know a method other than what I have mentioned below, please leave a comment below.
After a bit of exploration, I found a few ways by which you can find out if you are in private browsing or not.
For the first method, you need the browser tabs to show up for this to work, which means you will need at least two tabs open. If you have just one tab/window open, just hit the + to open another browser tab, and you will see the tabs showing up (see the screenshot below).
Right-click (or 2-finger tap on the trackpad) on the browser tab to bring up the menu. You will notice an option to “Move Tab to New Private Window”. The word “Private” shows that you are in private browsing. If you don’t see the word “Private”, then are you in normal browsing mode. So, that’s it!
Second, open a browser window/tab and scroll down(don’t enter any address/url yet). You will notice a “Privacy Report” section just like the one below.
The text clearly shows that it’s a Private Browser window/tab. If this was a normal browser window/tab, it will give you a count of the trackers that were blocked by Safari in the last seven days.
Now, there is a third way (bit cumbersome) to find out if it’s a normal or private browser window/tab. Go to one of the urls which you will usually leave logged in (don’t logout), such as Google Mail or Amazon. If you see that you are logged in (session is maintained), then obviously you are in a normal browsing mode. Because, usually private browsing does not maintain a session (or won’t keep you logged in — does not remember your session).
Hope this was helpful. But if there is a much easier way that I am missing, please let me know.
