Tuesday, 18 May 2010

Chrome Incognito Tracks Visited Sites

While using Google Chrome's Incognito Mode I've noticed that some information about visited sites is stored.  Certainly it doesn't store cookies or the URL history (as it appears in the URL bar).  However, follow these simple steps to confirm for yourself that some history is preserved:
  1. Start an incognito window
  2. Visit a URL you have never visited before, maybe http://www.elephants.com/
  3. Increase the zoom by pressing the Control key and + at the same time
  4. Close the incognito window
  5. Start a new incognito window
  6. Re-visit your URL (notice that it doesn't appear in the URL history)
As the site loads at step 6 you should now notice that the zoom level you previously chose has been remembered and reapplied.

I'm currently using Chrome 6.0.401.1 dev and reported this issue to Google a month or so ago and no fix has yet appeared.  It does also work with  5.0.396.0 dev.