Chrome's private browsing and guest mode allow users to browse without syncing history, cookies, or cached credentials to their main profile. These modes are useful for clean testing environments and presentations where personal browsing data should stay hidden.
Chrome Private Browsing
The profile syncing in Chrome is amazing. I use it all the time, but there are times when I don't want some stuff synchronized. Maybe I want to do a search that I don't want to show up in my history, or perhaps I'm testing something out and I don't want all that cache, credentials and everything that's inside of Chrome to mess up whatever I'm testing out. In those scenarios I may want to have some sort of private browsing, something that is not going to be tied to my regular account.
Here I'm on Chrome right here, and as you can see I'm logged in as TechKnowDJ and it is syncing. Syncing is on, and because of that you'll see things like my search history, you will also see my different accounts and my bookmark tabs that I have here. Also, there's some information that gets saved in the background: when I visit a site, there's things like cookies that are saved.
The first scenario is that I'm working on my TechKnowSurge website. If I go to it, so here's techknowsurge.com, number one, notice it already shows up in my history here. I've been to the site before. When I hit enter it comes up and it's receiving some information, it's downloading some information to present all of this, but it also could be taking information from my past visit from things like cookies, or it could be looking at other sites that I've been to in the past. So this might not be the same view as I would get as if I were visiting it fresh. Maybe I want to get a fresh look at techknowsurge.com as if I've never visited it before, just to test something out. That's where private browsing could come into place.
In my second scenario, I'm at a conference and I'm giving some sort of presentation to everyone else, and during that presentation I want to pull up a browser and I want to show everybody some sort of search that I'm doing. In that, they're going to see all of my search history, they're also going to see all my bookmarks that I have across the top, and I don't want that as part of my presentation. That's another example where private browsing can really help me out.
So what is private browsing? What I can do is I can click on this icon right here, this T that I have right here, which is showing my profile information. I could create a new profile fresh, but instead I'm going to choose Open Guest profile. I click on Open Guest profile, and it's also known as incognito, or private browsing, or whatever the case may be. Anything that I do within this session is not going to carry over, it's not going to be saved into other sessions.
So now when I pull this up, I can visit techknowsurge.com, and notice that it doesn't see that I've ever been there before. I'm going to hit techknowsurge.com and then I'm going to visit this site right here. Also, when I come to here, it's not pulling up my browser history, so I can do presentations without showing people my past history of what I've searched.
What's great about this is, now let's say I've tested my home site and it's like I'm seeing this fresh for the first time, to make sure that everything downloads correctly. Now what I'm going to do is close out of this, and then when I go back into it, I'm going to go back into Open Guest, and you can see that it acts as if I've not been there before. It's not auto-populating this, because I haven't been there before. Now I hit techknowsurge.com and it's like I'm visiting this site fresh again, so I can really test this out.
So this is an example. This guest mode, or incognito mode, or private browsing, or whatever you want to call it, is a way that I don't have to get my synced profile involved, and all of the prior history involved, as I visit this site or as I'm presenting to a group.
I can tell you I actually use the guest mode a lot in a lot of my demos. You'll see that the guest mode is pulled up specifically for the reasons I talked about, so that way you won't see a lot of my search history, and you won't see a lot of the icons that I have or the bookmark tabs that I have. You won't see all of those details in my demos that I present.
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