google chrome incognito mode is a great way to use the browser without your browsing or download history being recorded locally on your machine or in your google account. it’s an easy way to browse privately so that anyone with physical access to your computer can’t see what sites you’ve visited.
It’s worth noting that incognito mode is not a way to browse the web securely or anonymously. For example, you can still be tracked online by your ISP, your employer, or the website you are visiting. In incognito mode, cookies are not downloaded, but websites can still see your IP address. plus, you can still get infected with malware or spyware if you visit malicious sites.
however, the ability to erase your browsing footprint on the local computer is an excellent feature and very useful for many occasions and situations. you can enter incognito mode in chrome in two different ways: you can right click on the taskbar icon, choose a new incognito window in the menu panel by clicking on the settings icon in chrome or by pressing ctrl + shift + n and command + shift + n on os x.
However, if you use incognito mode a lot, a good idea might be to create a desktop shortcut that opens chrome directly in incognito mode. In this article, I will show how to create an incognito desktop shortcut on windows and os x.
windows incognito shortcut
on windows, you must add what is called a command line argument to the path of the shortcut. To do this, you first need a working shortcut on the desktop. If you don’t already have a chrome desktop shortcut, you can create one by navigating to the following path in your browser:
c:program files (x86)googlechromeapplication
right-click chrome.exe, select send to, and then click desktop (create shortcut).
now go to your desktop and right click on the chrome icon and choose properties.
You should already be in the shortcut tab where you will see a box called target. the path to the exe file will be enclosed in quotes. click inside the box and move the cursor all the way past the last quote.
now type in a space followed by -incognito. it’s worth noting that you can write a single dash or a double dash and they both work fine. officially, you should put two hyphens, so that’s what I’ve shown here.
“c:program files (x86)googlechromeapplicationchrome.exe” -incognito
When you click OK, you may get a uac warning that you don’t have permission to make the change. just click continue and it should update the shortcut without any problem.
now double click on the shortcut and you should see a new incognito window open. It’s probably a good idea to change the name of the shortcut as well so you can tell the difference between the two shortcuts.
If you want your incognito browser to open automatically when windows starts, you can use another command line parameter and simply add it after the -incognito parameter. the parameter to achieve this is -auto-launch-at-startup.
incognito shortcut to os x
on os x, you can’t just right click the dock icon and add parameters. for os x you need to create your own little app that just runs chrome with the same incognito parameter. It sounds complicated, but it’s actually quite easy.
first, open a program called apple script editor on your mac. you can click on the featured search and type script editor or you can go to applications, utilities and click there.
click new document to create a new project file. In the upper window, copy and paste the following code as shown below.
run shell script “open -a /apps/google\ chrome.app -args -incognito”
now click file – save and you will get the save as dialog. First, give your app a name. this is basically the name of the shortcut. then for where, change it to desktop. finally, change the file format to application.
click save and you will now see a new icon on your desktop. now you can click on this shortcut which is actually an app in os x and it will open chrome in incognito mode. the only problem is that chrome can no longer be open.
If that’s not acceptable, there are a couple of other options. instead of that line of code above, you can replace the above code with the following code:
This script will close all current chrome windows and then open a new chrome window in incognito mode. this is still not a perfect script because all other chrome windows will be closed. Fortunately, there is one more script you can test that does the job correctly.
This script will keep your current chrome windows open and open a new window that is in incognito mode. the only problem is that the app icon is just the default script editor icon.
To change this, you need to single-click the app on your desktop and then press command + i or right-click and choose get info. to change the icon of a mac application, you need to click on the icon in the upper left corner and then paste the new icon.
When you click on the icon in the top left, you will see that it is highlighted in blue. Before you paste a new icon, you’ll need to find one and copy it to the clipboard. on mac, you can’t use jpeg or png images, ico files, or anything like that. you can use icons that are already on the system or you must create an .icns file, which is the icon file format for mac.
to make things easy for us, just open the applications folder in finder and get information about the current chrome icon as shown below.
click the chrome icon in the top left and it will be highlighted in blue. now press command + c to copy it. open the get info screen in the new app we created, select the script editor icon in the top left, and press command + v to paste it. now you’ll have a nice chrome icon on your desktop that you can run on os x to open an incognito window without messing with the usual chrome tabs.
If you have any problems during the process, post a comment and I’ll try to help you. to enjoy! source code: stackexchcange