DEV Community

flpslv
flpslv

Posted on

Chroming Incognito

The subject has been brought up frequently from time to time, but I would like to ask "Do we really browse incognito?"

I mean, there are lots of warning guides teaching people about the Incognito mode and how to achieve it across several browsers, but is it really incognito? How far incognito does it go?

The other day I was trying to Incognito some browsing session due to my musical guilty pleasures (and not wanting to get recommendations based on those) when I thought:
Hey, How much Incognito is this, if:

  • It knows some of my history ?
  • It still shares the same data path as my regular mode browser ?
  • I open a second Incognito and it has my sessions from the first one ?

Ok, maybe Incognito isn't something we can fully achieve, there will be always some loophole but at least I wasn't going down that easily.

Just added this script to one of my path folders, and some of those thoughts just got some answers:

 #!/bin/bash

google-chrome --incognito --user-data-dir=$(mktemp -d /tmp/x.XXXXXXX) 2>/dev/null &

( and giving it execution permission of course )

It isn't perfect.
Along the day, my /tmp folder gets filled with these chrome data dirs, but it all goes away eventually (automatically with a reboot/power off or manually by simply removing them). Or I could just not run it in background and remove the folder after that. There's always room for improvement somewhere.

Now, this doesn't hold any guarantee that at some point, things stop being Incognito. But at least from what I've seen, it just creates another local degree of separation.

(I've only tested this with Chrome. I'm sure it must work with other browsers also)

Or you could just try to run the browser inside a container!!!

Top comments (0)