Incognito mode in Google Chrome is a great way to use the browser without recording your browsing or download history locally on your computer or on your Google account. This is an easy way to browse sites privately, so anyone with physical access to your computer won’t be able to see which sites you’ve visited.
It’s worth noting that Incognito Mode is not a way to browse the web safely or anonymously. For example, your ISP, employer, or website that you visit can still be tracked online. In incognito mode, cookies are not loaded, but websites can still see your IP address. In addition, you can still get malware or spyware when you visit malicious sites.
However, the ability to erase your browsing traces on your local computer is a great feature that is very useful in many cases and situations. You can enter incognito mode in Chrome in several ways: you can right-click the icon in the taskbar, select New Incognito Window from the menu bar when you click 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, it might be a good idea to create a desktop shortcut that opens Chrome directly in incognito mode. In this article, I will show you how to create an incognito desktop shortcut on Windows and OS X.
Windows Incognito Shortcut
On Windows, you need to add a so called command line argument to the shortcut path. To do this, you will first need a work shortcut on your desktop. If you don’t already have a Chrome shortcut on your desktop, you can create one by going to the following path in File Explorer:
C: Program Files (x86) Google Chrome Application
Right-click the chrome.exe file, select Submit, and then click Desktop (create shortcut).
Now go to your desktop, right-click the Chrome icon and select Properties.
You should already be on the Shortcut tab, where you will see the Target field. The path to the EXE file will be indicated in quotes. Click inside the box and move the cursor to the end of the last quote.
Now enter a space and then –incognito. It’s worth noting that you can enter either a single or double dash and both work fine. Officially you have to put two hyphens, this is what I showed here.
“C: Program Files (x86) Google Chrome Application chrome.exe” – incognito
When you click OK, you may receive a UAC warning that you do not have permission to make changes. Just click “Continue” and the shortcut should update without any problem.
Now double-click the shortcut and you should see a new incognito window opening straight up. It might also be worth changing the name of the shortcut so you can differentiate between the two.
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 –auto-launch-at-startup parameter is used for this.
OS X Incognito Shortcut
On OS X, you can’t just right-click on the dock icon and add options. For OS X, you need to create your own little app that simply launches Chrome with the same incognito setting. It sounds complicated, but it’s actually quite simple.
First, open the Apple Script Editor program on your Mac. You can either click on Spotlight search and type Script Editor, or go to Applications, Utilities and click it there.
Click New Document to create a new project file. In the top window, copy and paste the following code as shown below.
execute shell script “open -a / Applications / Google \ Chrome.app –args –incognito”
Now click File – Save and you will see the Save As dialog box. First, give your application a name. It’s basically a shortcut. Then, in the Where field, change it to Desktop. Finally, change the file format to “Application”.
Click Save and a new icon will appear on your desktop. Now you can click that shortcut, which is actually an application in OS X, and it will open Chrome in incognito mode. The only problem is that Chrome cannot be opened anymore.
If this is not acceptable, there are several more options. Instead of this line of code above, you can replace the above code with the following code:
tell application "Google Chrome" close make windows new window with properties { mode : " incognito " } activate end say
This script will close all current Chrome windows and then open a new Chrome window in incognito mode. This is still not a perfect scenario because all other Chrome windows will be closed. Fortunately, there is another script you can try that gets the job done as expected.
on is_running ( appName inform application "System events" before ( process names contains appName end is_running set chrome_running on is_running ( "Google Chrome" if chrome_running then tell application "Google Chrome" repeat c w in ( windows if w mode is "incognito" then set index w equal to 1 inform application " System events " to tell the process "Google Chrome" take action "AXRaise" windows 1 end tell activate return end if
This script will keep all current Chrome windows open and open a new incognito window. The only problem is that the app icon is just the default script editor icon.
To change this, you need to single-click the application on the desktop and then press COMMAND + I or right-click and select Get Info. To change the icon for a Mac application, you must click the icon in the upper left corner and then insert a new icon.
If you click on the icon in the upper left corner, you will see that it is highlighted in blue. Before you can insert a new icon, you need to find it and copy it to your clipboard. On Mac, you cannot use JPEG or PNG images, ICO files, or anything similar. You can use the icons already on the system, or you need to create an .ICNS file, which is the Mac icon file format.
To make things easier for us, just open the Applications folder in Finder and click Get Info on the current Chrome icon, as shown below.
Click on the Chrome icon in the upper left corner and it will be highlighted in blue. Now press COMMAND + C to copy it. Open the Get Info screen in the new application we created, select the script editor icon in the upper left corner and press COMMAND + V to paste it. You will now have a beautiful Chrome desktop icon that you can launch in OS X to open a window in incognito mode without interfering with the regular Chrome tabs.
If you have any problems in the process, please leave a comment and I’ll try to help. Enjoy! Code Source: StackExchcange
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