The Life and Times of Michael Shadle

I hate Windows. I do.

This is a very hacky, no-garbage-collection, but still "working good enough" script. At the advice of #chromium on freenode, when asked about cookie sharing between Incognito windows, I was told it's been discussed before, and I got the information on how to make sure that your Incognito windows don't share information or cookies by forcing separate user data directories.

I'm not really worried about privacy, I'm more annoyed that I launch separate Incognito windows and it shares cookies between them, which is sort of against the point. I have to login to the same sites over and over under different accounts for different clients, and it's a PITA.

Major things to note:

• This assumes you'll run some sort of "temp directory cleanup" tool on your own for Windows. This doesn't have any concept of "oh yeah, I have to cleanup that temp directory I made"
• None of your extensions, bookmarks, settings, etc. will be remembered in this session. It's completely barren.
• You will never (assuming the GUID is unique) get the same session more than once.

As I said, it's hacky, and you'll need to change a couple of the paths. I couldn't figure it out elegantly, and I was getting tired of trying to find script examples on the net (why is it so hard to find code that works together for Microsoft languages?)

Perhaps someday soon Chrome or someone will develop something more robust for this. For now, if you want - this does seem to work, at least on my XP SP3 system.

Note: This is vbscript. Make a file called "incognito.vbs" or something and it should work.

' keep us honest
Option Explicit

' because we have to
Dim strDirectory
Dim strTempDirectory
Dim TypeLib
Dim objFSO
Dim objShell
Dim strChromePath

' change this if you want - anything with spaces has to have be wrapped in triple quotes
strChromePath = """C:\Documents and Settings\mike\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"""
strTempDirectory = "C:\Windows\Temp"

' make a clean guid
Set TypeLib = CreateObject("Scriptlet.TypeLib")
strDirectory = TypeLib.Guid
strDirectory = Replace(strDirectory, "{", "")
strDirectory = Replace(strDirectory, "}", "")
strDirectory = strTempDirectory & "\" & strDirectory

' create the directory
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
objFSO.CreateFolder(strDirectory)

' launch it, or fail
If err.number = vbEmpty then
   Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
   objShell.run (strChromePath & " --incognito --no-first-run --user-data-dir=" & strDirectory)
Else
   WScript.echo "VBScript Error: " & err.number
End If

' cleanup
Set TypeLib = nothing
set objFSO = nothing
Set objShell = nothing

' quit
WScript.Quit()