Browse Privately in Chrome Without Going Fully Incognito

 

Incognito mode in Chrome is great for private browsing sessions, but its annoying that it disables other things too, like cookies. Here's how to keep sites from being logged in your history in an otherwise normal Chrome session.

If you want to browse privately but still be able to stay signed into all your sites, you can keep your history from logging them without the trouble of an entire Incognito session. Reader tutleman explains:

Though Chrome is a great browser, I'm always bugged by the fact that I can't tell it not to save my history without being in incognito mode. To fix this, just head on over to
~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/History on a Mac, or C:\Users\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\History on Windows. Then, just set the history file as read only. Poof! Now Chrome won't keep your browsing history past the current session.

To set a file as read only in Windows, just right click on it, hit Properties, and check the "Read Only" box. In OS X, right click on the file, hit Get Info, and under "Permissions" set every drop-down to Read Only.