How to use Chrome

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Incognito mode (browse in private)

For times when you want to browse in stealth mode, Google Chrome offers the incognito browsing mode. Here's how the incognito mode works:

  • Webpages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito aren't recorded in your browsing and download histories.
  • All new cookies are deleted after you close all incognito windows that you've opened.
  • Changes made to your Google Chrome bookmarks and general settings while in incognito mode are always saved.

Tip: If you're using Chrome OS, you can use the guest browsing feature as an alternative to incognito mode. When browsing as a guest, you can browse the web and download files as normal. Once you exit your guest session, all of your browsing information from the session is completely erased.

Open an incognito window

  1. Click the Chrome menu Chrome menu on the browser toolbar.
  2. Select New incognito window.
  3. A new window will open with the incognito icon incognito icon in the corner. You can continue browsing as normal in the other window.

You can also use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+Shift+N (Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS) and ⌘-Shift-N (Mac) to open an incognito window.

Windows 8 users: To switch between windows, click the window switcher Window switcher on the top right corner.

Browsing in incognito mode only keeps Google Chrome from storing information about the websites you've visited. The websites you visit may still have records of your visit. Any files saved to your computer or mobile devices will still remain.

For example, if you sign into your Google Account on http://www.google.com while in incognito mode, your subsequent web searches are recorded in your Google Web History. In this case, to prevent your searches from being stored in your Google Account, you'll need to pause your Google Web History tracking.

On Chrome for iOS, due to platform limitation regular and incognito* tabs share HTML5 local storage, which is typically used by sites to store files on your device (client-side caching) or to provide offline functionality. This means the same sites can always access their data in this storage in both regular and incognito* tabs. Incognito* tabs will still keep browsing history and cookies separate from regular tabs, which are cleared once those tabs are closed.