musically-ut/key-ncognito

Feature Request: reverse functionality within an incognito window

jcahill opened this issue · 3 comments

jcahill commented

Feature Request

When activating the extension from within Incognito Mode, open the selected link in a normal (non-incognito) window.

Default Window Management Behavior
Create this normal window if none exists, else reuse an open window (add tabs to end).

Alternate Window Management Behavior(s)
Allow user to choose between:

  • reuse an open window — add tab(s) to end
  • reuse an open window — add tab(s) "where you were" (i.e. after last normal tab that had focus)
  • always open in new window

To keep things relatively clean while allowing for maximum flexibility + functionality, the base behavior and/or some or all of the alternates could be integrated as opt-in "Actions" somewhat like those used by the Linkclump extension.

That way, the user can choose whether to enable the reverse-behavior, whether to overload the open-in-incognito key combination or define separate key combinations for each action, etc.

musically-ut commented

This is an interesting idea. However, I couldn't quite figure out a use-case for this.

Could you please describe a situation where you would want this behavior? That may dictate the shape this feature takes.

jcahill commented

There are a variety of miscellaneous use-cases that would largely depend on why the user is in incognito mode and why they need to leave it.

The general notion, though, is that the method and level of effort required to pop out of incognito mode for a sec and then continue browsing incognito should be symmetrical with the opposite case.

So some examples fitting the base action off the top of my head would be:

  1. User wants to use google search incognito for whatever reason (unbiased results, to avoid adding search history, so they don't have to log out of their google account, etc.) but sees a hit on a site they want or need to give saved credentials to — subscription-based research, paywalled news, social media.

  2. User is browsing through various related pages incognito, but wants to make sure a particular link they come across stays in their history so they don't lose track of it or can find it later.

    Online shopping would be a good example where many tabs — often with very similar URLs and page names that make backtracking annoying — might be opened, but almost all of the browsing session will end up being history-clutter except for a handful of pages.

  3. User wants one of their extensions to interact with a link or set of links somehow, but without breaking pace / interrupting their browsing to copy URLs over manually to a non-private window.

    Ad blockers, download managers, and companion extensions to particular websites (y'know, "pin it" button for pinterest and so on — data push/pull type stuff) all come to mind there.

As for the alternate actions:

reuse an open window — add tab(s) "where you were"

User only popped into incognito as a brief aside from regular browsing, i.e. probably because they had to for some reason or wanted to do something quick like compare logged in/logged out views of a page or kill extensions to get content to load.

So, thematically-speaking, if they see stuff while they're there that they wanna click on and know they won't need to load said stuff incognito, the best place to put it is probably right after the last regular tab they were in.

always open in new window

This user hates organization, themselves, or both, and probably puts their two thousand or so desktop icons into piles like leaves for their animated malware mascot Virtual Dog assistant to play in.

Just kidding, but most of the cases of opening several new windows in succession imply that you're keeping them apart to separate the branches of an impending tab-opening-spree, e.g.:

  • loading media albums or playlists
  • following related links, aka "wiki-walking"
  • pre-loading several forums / subreddits / blogs / site-internal categories etc. to browse at length later

There probably aren't so many use-cases specific to incognito browsing there, but I'm sure it'd be the preferred behavior for some users some of the time.

Admittedly, many of the most obvious use-cases would be covered by an update re: Issue #4: Open current web page in Incognito mode similar to Incognito This Tab's implementation of a bidirectional incognito ⇔regular toggle for the current tab.

But plenty wouldn't, and loading several incognito tabs just to manually reload each of them as a regular tab is a seriously tedious workflow and waste of bandwidth.

Plus that still wouldn't cover common issues like login redirects, obfuscated google search URLs, pages that want to resubmit data on refresh, and so on.

musically-ut commented

Thanks for the detailed write up. 👍

The use-cases are interesting and make a lot of sense; I had never used Incognito mode with these scenarios in mind but I am convinced that added functionality will be worth it.

I am swamped with work this week, but I am definitely going to work on this, as well as #4 , as soon as I get some free time. I'll keep this issue open and will probably create sub-issues to handle the addition of these features in pieces when I start working on it.

Thanks again!