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How to See Incognito History On Macbook?

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Incognito mode is a mode that allows users to browse the Internet privately without leaving any traces (like local data, etc.), it prevents other users using the same device from seeing any user activity. Because the incognito history isn’t saved at all unless you search on Google again, it’s often the case that you’d like to go back to a website you previously opened in incognito mode, but you can’t. 

Now, one might think that browsing history won’t be retrieved at all in incognito mode, but that’s not the case. There is a way in the Mac operating system that allows us to view and delete our incognito history. You can check out many third-party applications online, but we don’t use any of them, we use the macOS terminal to look them up from the DNS cache.

Incognito Mode

 

DNS and DNS Cache:

DNS stands for Domain Name System. DNS allows us to interact with devices on the Internet without having to remember long strings of numbers. It is a decentralized hierarchical naming system that allows mapping between hostnames and their numerical addresses on the network, in simple words It translates any website’s Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to its corresponding IP address. An IP address is a unique address used to identify a computer or node on the Internet. The address is just a string of numbers written in a specific format. Usually represented by a string of numbers, such as 192.155.12.1. For example, We can easily access the GeeksforGeeks website with the geeksforgeeks.org instead of 104.26.10.228 from the search bar, it is because of DNS.

DNS Cache

 

DNS cache is a temporary storage that stores recent DNS queries locally on a computer. It keeps a record of all recently visited websites for quick responses from DNS servers. It speeds up the IP address matching process by processing the names of recently visited addresses before sending the request to the Internet.

How To See Incognito History:

Below are the steps mentioned to see the incognito history, Follow them properly.

First Phase:

1. Click on the Go tab above and select Utilities. After opening Utilities, open the console.

MacOS

 

2. In the sidebar select your Mac.

3. Type the following command

 "any:mdnsresponder" 

4. Click on the start play button present in the toolbar.

MacOS Console

 

Second Phase:

1. Click on the Go tab above and select Utilities. After opening Utilities, open the terminal.

MacOS utilities

 

2. In Terminal type the following command and execute it: 

sudo killall -INFO mDNSResponder.

3. It will ask for the password, type your password and hit return.

Terminal

 

4. Open the Console again (described in Step 1) and see the Incognito history. 

Because DNS directories translate domain
 names to IP addresses,
you can't see the exact domain name of the 
website you open, but you see the IP address of the website you open.

How To Delete Incognito History:

Below are the steps mentioned to delete the incognito history, Follow them properly.

1. Click on the Go tab above and select Utilities. After opening Utilities, open the terminal.

 

2. In Terminal type the following command and execute it:

 sudo dscacheutil -flushcache;
 sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder.

3. It will ask for the password, type your password and hit return.

Terminal

 

After successfully executing step 3, your DNS Cache is cleared and your private browsing (Incognito mode) history is deleted from the system. 


Last Updated : 28 Oct, 2022
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