In Today’s digital world privacy is a huge issue to many people and everyone is trying to do something to protect their privacy. People often feel that someone is watching over them especially when they are trying to access the internet. One of such issue is when they use a browser to use certain web-based products. And most of them use Chrome browser to access the internet. There is this feature called Incognito Mode in Chrome browser to access the internet privately. Now you’ll ask how do you go incognito.
How to Enable and Disable Incognito Mode
Incognito feature of Chrome browser lets you watch or browse anything on the internet and it won’t save any of the sessions. Suppose you are at your friend’s house and want to access some classified materials and you don’t want your friend to know what you are doing on their system, you can do so by using incognito mode feature on Google Chrome browser.
Incognito mode doesn’t record history or any passwords you used and your sessions. Once you exit out of incognito mode, you’re logged on sessions will be terminated. So it is very handy for users like me. Incognito mode can be accessed by clicking on Chrome menu then click the new incognito window. You can also use incognito mode shortcut by clicking ctrl+shift+N to open new incognito tab on the browser.
Some users want to access incognito mode and want to restrict the access to incognito mode feature on their systems. So that other can’t access the feature on their system. Well for those users today I’m going to show you how to enable and disable the incognito mode feature on the windows devices, Android devices, iPhone and MAC.
As we all know Google Chrome browser is available for all these devices listed. And in this article, we will talk about them separately for each and every device.
Nowadays the most common devices used on earth are windows devices and in this device, the most common browser is Google Chrome with almost 60% usage percentage. That’s pretty heavy I mean that number is very high compared to its competitors.
Ok. Here we go. We’ll start with the windows devices.
FOR WINDOWS
If you are using Chrome on windows, and you want to prevent someone from using the incognito mode. Here are the steps to enable or disable the incognito mode.
- Press Windows Key and hold it then press R to open the Run box.
- In the Run box Type ‘regedit’ and then press Enter.
- Now you need to click on the ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE’.
- And then click on ‘SOFTWARE’.
- And then click on ‘Policies’.
- And then to ‘Google’.
- And then to ‘Chrome’.
- NOTE: if you are not seeing the Google and Chrome folders then you have to create them yourself.
- Now right click on the Chrome folder and select ‘New’ to ‘DWORD 32-bit value’.
- Give a name to the value like ‘IncognitoModeAvailability’.
- Now double click on ‘IncognitoModeAvailability’.
- A box will appear and you need to set the value to ‘1’.
- And you are done. Now restart the computer and you will find the incognito mode feature disabled.
If you want to revert the changes place ‘0’ in place of ‘1’.
Now if you don’t want to do all that you can download this registry import file. And run it to set the changes for you.
FOR MAC
Macbook comes with preloaded safari browser to access the internet nut often people use Google Chrome to access the internet. Because Google Chrome is very fast from safari and it also has some cool feature which safari lag.
Now if you want to enable or disable incognito mode in Mac OS, you can do so very easily by using the steps shown below.
- First, open finder and then go to utilities.
- And then type terminal and press enter.
- Now when the terminal is opened, type the following.
- defaults write com.Google.Chrome IncongnitoModeAvailability –integer 1
- Now press Enter.
- Finally, restart your Mac. And you will not find incognito mode in Chrome.
Now in future, if you want to enable the incognito mode again just place ‘0’ in place of ‘1’.
FOR ANDROID
Well, there is not any direct method to block incognito mode on Android devices. However, there are some third-party apps available that claim to block the incognito mode from chrome browser. One such app is ‘Qustodio’. To use Qustodio app you use following steps.
- Download Qustodio app and install.
- Open the app and create a qustodio account.
- Now go to ‘configure this device’.
- To ‘Device Settings’ > ‘Block Incognito Browsing’.
- Now, wait for some time for Qustodio to do the work and block all private browsing sessions.
Once this feature is enabled Qustodio will detect any type of private browsing happening. As soon as user start to browse the incognito mode Qustodio will block that session permanently and can only be unlocked by when Qustodio administrator account enters the Qustodio password. Blocking the incognito is not immediate but it does the job. It takes some time to figure out that incognito mode is in use.
FOR iOS
To disable private browsing in iOS devices you can follow these steps.
- Go to Settings.
- To general > restrictions
- To Websites and then select.
- Limit Adult Content or Specific Websites Only.
- Now private browsing button will disappear.
This is from the inbuilt browser in iOS devices. However, you cannot disable the private browsing option in Google Chrome for iOS devices.
So there you have it all the possible options on how to go incognito or how to disable incognito for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS devices. While some of the solutions are not permanent once they evolve we’ll update our solutions as soon as possible. So, for the time being, enjoy these solutions do comment down below if you have any queries about any of the solutions you can also comment any other query you like or make a suggestion and make this article even better.
Well, thanks for reading and do share this article with your friends.