Chrome Incognito doesnt work with Facebook (And perhaps other sites too)

Hi just to let you guys know, when testing InCognito mode on Chrome, certain sites don’t work, these are some popular sites like facebook, hotmail and probably others as well. This is possibly because Incognito mode doesn’t allow browser/computer information be taken off the brower to the server and therefore causing the website code unable to identify the type of browser that you are using normally used for compatibility checks.

Google Calendar’s also breaks but Gmail works…

The problem doesn’t appear to be in IE’s InPrivate though. So lets get down on what these browsers present to webservers in different modes like normal vs secure mode of browsing. This will give you an idea why sites like Facebook kicks out some modes and allow others..

Chrome without InCognito

Browser (User Agent):

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.46 Safari/525.19

Chrome when in Incognito mode

Browser (User-Agent):

IE without InPrivate mode

Browser (User-Agent):

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; InfoPath.2; FDM; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0)

IE when InPrivate mode:

Browser (User-Agent):

So, there you have it, that’s why those sites bitch about your Chrome in InCognito mode, whereas IE’s InPrivate mode tells the server everything about you in InPrivate, sigh, something that Microsoft should seriously rethink. Afterall, its call INPRIVATE right..

Happy weekend.

Sanjay