Having a private browsing mode built in to your browser -- like Incognito in Google Chrome -- can be incredibly handy. I used it as a way to log in to multiple Gmail accounts prior to Google enabling that feature natively. It's useful for hiding local traces of your browsing activities, of course.

Once in a while, however, you (like me) may find yourself accidentally typing one of your Incognito-only URLs into a standard Chrome tab. It's an easy enough mistake to make when you've got multiple browser windows open and your focus is somewhat lacking.

Fortunately, however, it's also easy to prevent. The Autonito extension for Chrome allows you to create a list of sites which you only want opening in Incognito mode.

Type one of your chosen URLs, and Autonito stops the tab from loading and pops it out into a new Incognito window. The only thing lacking right now is wildcard support, but based on the number of requests on the Gallery page I suspect it will be added soon.

It's not perfect, of course, because it does leave a complete list of those sites on the Autonito options page. Still, with no icon displayed in Chrome's toolbar, it's fairly well tucked away on chrome://extensions. Nobody's going to poke around in there, right?

Have I mentioned before how great it would be for Chrome to have a master password?

Autonito opens websites you specify in Google Chrome's Incognito mode -- automatically! originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 09 Aug 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.