How in the Tech

Automatically Start IE8, Firefox, Chrome in Private Browsing Mode

By Adam Myers ⋅ April 1, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Privacy

Web privacy is quite a hot topic as of late. The idea that most everything we do on the Internet is tracked and then used against us – not necessarily meant to be a negative – is understood by a greater percentage of users, not just the web savvy folks of even a year ago. The momentum behind privacy has become so strong that now all modern browsers ship with a feature called Private browsing (Firefox), Icognito mode (Chrome),  or InPrivate browsing (IE) - and unofficially titled porn mode. Private browsing prevents the browser and websites it loads from storing or tacking information between browsing sessions. When you shutdown your browser, all your activity, browser cache, and cookies are removed – leaving no tracks to later be followed. Nice feature in certain situations but none of the major browsers make it easy to enable the functionality automatically for every session. If this interests you, here’s how to go about it.

Firefox 3.1 Private Mode

1. From the AwesomeBar type about:config and hit enter.
2. In the Filter box type browser.privatebrowsing.autostart.
3. In the main Firefox window one result should be returned, titled as above. Double  click on it to change the value to true.

Internet Explorer 8 InPrivate Browsing

1. Internet Explorer requires you to modify the shortcut used to launch the browser. Locate the shortcut item either on your desktop or in your Start Menu.
2. Right-click on the icon and select Properties.
3. Append -private in the target box after the final quotation mark.

Google Chrome Incognito Mode

1. In a similar fashion to IE8 above, modify the Target box of the shortcut appending –icognito. Note that this is a double dash, where as IE was just the single dash.