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when private browsing, a website i visited once keeps opening in a new window....for weeks now! How can I stop this?

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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I visited a news site awhile back to read an article. I think I was private browsing at the time. Now, often when I am private browsing another window will open up without tabs or menubar to the same news site and article. This is not only annoying but shows that my "Private" browsing is somehow being remembered. How do I fix this?

I visited a news site awhile back to read an article. I think I was private browsing at the time. Now, often when I am private browsing another window will open up without tabs or menubar to the same news site and article. This is not only annoying but shows that my "Private" browsing is somehow being remembered. How do I fix this?

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Firefox shouldn't remember any visited websites that you visited in the Private Browsing mode session.

You can check for problems with the sessionstore.js file in the Firefox profile folder that store session data.

Deleting sessionstore.js will cause App Tabs and Tab Groups and open and closed (undo) tabs to get lost and you will have to recreate them (make a note or bookmark them if possible).


You can remove all data stored in Firefox from a specific domain via "Forget About This Site" in the right-click context menu of an history entry ("History > Show All History" or "View > Sidebar > History") or via the about:permissions page.

Using "Forget About This Site" will remove all data stored in Firefox from that domain like bookmarks, cookies, passwords, cache, history, and exceptions, so be cautious and if you have a password or other data from that domain that you do not want to lose then make sure to backup this data or make a note.

You can't recover from this 'forget' unless you have a backup of the involved files.

It doesn't have any lasting effect, so if you revisit such a 'forgotten' website then data from that website will be saved once again.