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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.

Ryan
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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.

nburr
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  • So there's no way to basically remove all cookies for the tab / whatever else incognito does? I'm not entirely sure what else might be screwing up sessions on this website, but if I can get close enough to the incognito environment perhaps the problem will be solved. – Ryan Sep 26 '15 at 04:02
  • What types of errors are you getting? And as for cookies, Chrome doesn't handle them any differently in Incognito mode, other than the fact that it doesn't store them after the window closes. – nburr Sep 26 '15 at 04:18
  • Blackboard throws figuratively every error imaginable. Often it will just kick you back to the login page with no error or there will be alerts popping up saying that there's an error on the page or the modals will say something like "Access Denied". All of this is solved in incognito. – Ryan Sep 29 '15 at 21:39
  • Very strange. And these errors aren't being caused by some type of collision with any of your Chrome extensions? I ask because extensions are disabled by default in Incognito mode. Also, any error messages you can provide verbatim will help give me more insight into the root of the problem. – nburr Sep 30 '15 at 00:45