How to Get the Previous Version of Paywall in Chrome Incognito Mode
Chrome: Bypassing paid access – and defining user methods for doing so – is a cat-and-mouse game that has been fought between news publishers and readers for some time. While browsing a website in incognito has been a proven method of getting journalists around the site’s restrictions on the number of free articles you can view at any given time, publishers don’t go without their own gimmicks. Recently, some websites have become more inventive in how they detect incognito mode:
We previously talked about a special flag that can be adjusted in Chrome’s settings, which should prevent websites from telling you that you are using incognito mode. It didn’t work very well in Chrome 74.
Now if you upgrade your browser to Chrome 75 – click the three dots icon in the upper right corner, click Help and click About Google Chrome – this little trick seems to work again. To enable it (if you haven’t done so before), enter chrome: // flags in the address bar, look for the phrase “filesystem” and select “Enabled” from the “Incognito File System API” drop-down menu. parameter.
This is all a moot point, as Google has raised the stakes significantly by enabling this flag – by default – in Chrome 76, which is slated for public release in late July. If you want to try it out now, you can download the recently released beta version of the browser.
Are news publishers excited about the upcoming changes to Chrome? Probably no. Will they find another way to detect and limit incognito Chrome browsers? Maybe yes.
It doesn’t matter , as you really have to pay your favorite publisher the pitifully low monthly subscription price he asks for news. This is a legal good move. For the occasional one-off article, however, incognito mode – a gimmick that’s been around for over a decade – is about as ethically questionable as returning for a second free sample at Costco. Don’t abuse it because then you are a moron, but don’t get in a moral panic if you used it to view four articles a month instead of the three free ones you are allowed to view. It happens.
How to check if your browser is hiding Incognito Mode
If you’re ever wondering if a website can tell if you’re using incognito mode in Chrome, check out the weirdly named jsfiddle.net/w49x9f1a/ . When you open it, the site will run a quick test and report the results in the corner of your browser:
Target? To ensure that this website reports that your browser is not running in incognito mode when it is. If the site correctly detects incognito mode, something is wrong: either you are using an older version of Chrome, or you have incorrectly set the aforementioned flag, or there is something wrong with Chrome’s implementation of the incognito file system API .