Google is improving privacy by allowing users to lock Chrome Incognito tabs

silversurfer · Aug 13, 2021

Changes have been spotted in the Chromium Gerrit code repository, which points to improvements being made to improve browsing privacy. A new flag in Chrome Canary 94 points to new features that will allow users to lock tabs in the Chrome Incognito browser.

Chrome Incognito is a great option when browsing private or confidential websites. For example, if you are doing online banking and you need an extra layer of privacy to keep your information safe. Google is now adding measures to keep you even safer when browsing with Chrome Incognito.

To help keep your tabs secure on your Android device, Google will be adding optional biometric authentication to the app. This feature is not available to use yet as it is still inactive, even in Canary, but it is already an option in the Privacy menu on Chrome for Android.

This change comes in line with a similar update that has already been released for iOS. With the iOS update, tabs on Incognito are locked behind verifications using Apple’s biometrics, ie. Face ID. However, since many Android devices don’t have facial recognition, fingerprint authentication, or both, there may be different options on the Android OS. This might be in the form of a pin or even a password, but we’ll have to wait and see.

So far, there hasn’t been any indication that this lock setting will be coming to other Chrome platforms, such as desktop or even Chrome OS. However, it follows as the next logical step for Google to introduce this feature to other Chrome platforms.