Firefox behaving differently

[Jim Byrnes]

Using Mint 20.3 and Firefox 117.0

Most of my searching and general browsing is done in a private Firefox 
window. Selected financial and shopping sites are done in a normal 
window. At the end of most days I open the privacy settings in the 
normal window and clear the cache and delete any cookies that are not 
from sites that I allow to keep cookies and other web data.

Up until a couple of weeks ago I never saw any cookies or web data from 
sites that I had only visited in a private window. Lately I have been 
seeing web data from google and yahoo in the list of cookies and web 
data in the privacy settings of my normal window. At first I thought I 
might have inadvertently used a normal window by mistake.

As a test I cleared out all cookies I didn't want and cleared the cache 
in the normal window. Then I logged into yahoo mail in a private window. 
After I logged out I looked in the normal window and yahoo showed up in 
the privacy settings in the normal window.

I haven't manually changed any settings in Firefox for quite awhile, but 
I have applied all updates I have received, so I imagine that's why the 
behavior has changed. To me this detracts from the usefulness of a 
private window and was wondering if anyone else is seeing this?

Regards,  Jim