Is it possible to simulate incognito mode in current tab? (chrome extension)

Question

There's a website that many people in university programs despise that is blackboard. My school has their own instance of blackboard running that must be completely misconfigured because your session times out almost instantly or you get thousands of errors popping up as you try to browse after logging in. These problems seem to be fixed when logging in via incognito mode.

Question: I've created an extension that, when you navigate to blackboard, closes your current tab and opens blackboard in a new incognito window. Is it possible to achieve something to the same effect inside the current tab?

My current solution works fine, but it would be 100 times better to "spoof" incognito in the current tab.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, no. Chrome is purposefully designed with certain separations between Normal and Incognito mode, including the restriction of intermixing tab types in one window. The chrome.tabs API provides several methods for accessing and manipulating tab properties but there isn't a way to 'spoof' a tab's properties, other than updating them using chrome.tabs.update , which does not provide the capability to update a tab's incognito property.