Apple was the first to bring the private browsing feature with its Safari browser. Later Google introduced the same feature for Chrome by calling it “Incognito Mode”. When any websites are in Incognito Mode on Chrome, this feature doesn’t let the browser store any data locally on your phone or PC. When you close the Incognito Mode tabs on your browser, it deletes browsing history, search-engine searches, cache & cookies, login information, and many more.
Google brings a new feature for Chrome for Android with more security. This feature lets you lock and unlock your Incognito Mode tabs behind your fingerprint. This feature makes private browsing much stronger and much safer when someone else tries to use your phone and you don’t want them accidentally opening your private tabs when you are away from your phone.
After enabling this feature, Chrome will instantly lock your Incognito tabs once you exit the app. So, when you try to launch the browser and open those incognito tabs again, you will get a gray screen with an option to “Unlock Incognito” at the bottom of the screen. Then you need to unlock the incognito tabs with fingerprint authentication.
If you don’t want to use a fingerprint sensor, you can also go with the “Use PIN” option to unlock the private tabs in Incognito mode.
How to Lock Incognito Tabs on the Chrome browser for Android
Google is slowly rolling out this feature to Android users. If you want to run this feature immediately on your phone, you can do it by enabling the incognito reauthentication flag on the Chrome browser with recent versions of Android.
chrome://flags/#incognito-reauthentication-for-android
Once you have enabled the Chrome flags, follow the below steps.
- Open the 3-dot menu on the top right corners of the Chrome browser and select the Settings button.
- Hit the Privacy and Security option now
- Enable the “Lock Incognito tabs when you leave Chrome” toggle now
Even after enabling the incognito flags, this feature’s actual toggle not yet appearing in the Settings for some users. It seems they have to wait till Google rolls out this feature to all the stable users.