Developers can now stop their Chrome extensions from working in Incognito mode

Most times we see no extensions working in Chrome’s incognito mode, but this is only because Google turns them all off by default. Jump into the extension settings and you will find the vast majority of these have a check box to “allow in incognito”. Now, just because you have the option to, it doesn’t mean you should allow all your additional Chrome software to run in the private browser, though.

Google recognizes this, so they are introducing the ability for extension makers to deny access to incognito. So far it is only an experimental feature and it is working in Canary, but we can assume it will likely make its way to the stable version of Chrome in due time.

All developers have to do is set the manifest “incognito” field value to “not_allowed”. This would get rid of the “Allow in incognito” option withing the extension settings.

For those who may not know what Chrome Canary is, it’s pretty much the beta to Chrome Beta. The name comes from an old practice in which miners would bring a canary to their working grounds, where there could potentially be poisonous gases. If there was any danger, the canary would die before the miners, serving as a form of alarm. In the same way, Chrome Canary is the testing ground that all bleeding edge features go through when they are to new to put in the stable or even beta channels. It’s a very experimental build, and you should only use it if you want to experiment with new features.