Why does Chrome's Incognito mode retrieve resources faster than the normal mode?

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I tested this from multiple machines (desktops and laptops) and OSes (Windows and Mac), and I can replicate the same behavior:
Resources are downloaded much faster in Incognito mode (not the rendering speed)

I could roughly think of two conditions under which Incognito and normal modes can be faster respectively:

  • Incognito mode can be faster because it has no extensions.
  • Normal mode can be faster because it caches the resource.

So I disabled all my extensions in normal mode and "reset" all the settings which deleted cache and browsing history, etc.

In all cases, when I looked at the Chrome inspector, resources are downloaded much faster in Incognito mode than in normal mode. Links load blazingly fast in Incognito mode.

Why is this a case?

google-chrome browser performance
2 Answers

I had the same problem and it turned out to be a caching problem. The same was also mentioned here: https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAP1KN0B0JRiv4Pyb8uE/?hl=no

Why does an incognito tab load a website much faster than a site opened normal tab?

I was able to achieve the same loading speed without the incognito mode by using this answer: Disable cache Chrome Extension (I made it work for all urls urls: ["<all_urls>"])

Disabling cache with webRequest has made it as fast as in the incognito mode.

Update: now with new hardware and an SSD it doesn't seem to make a difference for me.

user_103648420
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