Home > News

Google Making It More Difficult for Sites to Block Incognito Mode in Chrome

By Laura Tucker
Google Making It More Difficult for Sites to Block Incognito Mode in Chrome Featured Image

Sometimes you just want to browse privately and don’t want a record of where you’ve been and don’t want ads to start popping up that are related to whatever you were searching for.

For this reason many browsers have some type of private browsing feature. Google has Incognito mode for their Chrome browser. Some sites detect it and disable it so that you aren’t really browsing privately, but a report by 9to5google shows that Google is working on making it more difficult for sites to block Incognito mode in Chrome.

Google’s Efforts with Incognito Mode

The struggle with this stems from websites’ desire to track your interests and to provide you with advertising. But you either don’t want those ads or just don’t want your activities tracked.

Knowing that browsers have private browsing modes, some sites try to block that type of feature. The easiest way for sites to block Chrome’s Incognito mode is to use the “FileSystem” API that applications store files in temporarily or permanently. Incognito mode disables the API, and these websites are able to determine that it’s disabled and then try to block it from doing so.

Obviously it’s the exact opposite of what Google is trying to accomplish with Incognito mode. They are trying to make it undetected, but sites are turning it around to use it to detect you.

news-google-chrome-incognito-search

9to5google reports that “a series of recent commits to Chromiums Gerrit source code management reveal that Google is finally looking to solve this issue, after years of being aware of it.”

When Chrome is asked for a file system while in Incognito, it will create a virtual filesystem using RAM to be sure once you leave Incognito that it’s deleted. This will prevent the known methods of detecting if you’re using Incognito mode.

When Will This Be Available?

The exact date Google plans to launch this feature in Chrome is unknown, but the developer for the project says his plan is for it to arrive in Chrome 74 behind flag and then be enabled by default in Chrome 76. The most current browser is Chrome 72.

Until then, you should of course remember that you aren’t necessarily “incognito.” You can still be detected. It’s important to know that. You’re not as private as you thought you were in Chrome

The question, though, is how long it will be before websites develop another way to block Incognito mode. They exist to make money. They aren’t going to rest with the thought that it’s impossible to detect you and track you to serve you appropriate ads. It seems the goal needs to be to just stay on top of it.

Do you use Incognito mode in Google Chrome? Did you know you were still able to be detected by some websites while using it? Let us know in the comments below about your usage of this feature.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.