After some detective work of my own, this looks to be a temporary situation that affects the Firefox browser after a while of working in the Joomla back-end. The unpublished articles do not appear when browsing the site from other browsers and devices. They continue to appear even after I've closed Joomla the admin back-end.

The same seems to be the case with arcticles suddenly offering edit buttons to 'the world'. This caused some panic until I realised it was a temporary situation only affecting my browser - well, that is as far as I know!

I think I've finally cottoned on to what is going on. Joomla 4 is behaving like Wordpress. When logged in as superuser the front end offers editing controls. Perhaps Joomla has always done this? I'm not sure - I've been maintaining Joomla sites for many years and never seen this feature.

Hi there!

Thanks for your query and all these insights. Yes your findings are true :)

Usually, the superuser account and the users has administrative access and editing permissions can see the edit icons in the frontend once logged in to the administrator.

However, here is all about ACL, and the feature comes from Joomla core: https://www.joomshaper.com/blog/complete-guide-to-joomla-role-based-user-access

Best Regards