I was having a brief discussion with a friend about always clearing browser history on exit (or using incognito mode). He didn't do it because he wanted the "smart fill" to occur whenever he typed in the web address of a previously visited site in order to save time. I said my way around this was to put any regularly visited website in my bookmarks because the browser checked there whenever I started entering a web address, providing me with the same "smart fill" function.
My question is, can a website view the contents of my bookmarks folder, negating part of the reason for using incognito mode or clearing history on exit?
My question is, can a website view the contents of my bookmarks folder, negating part of the reason for using incognito mode or clearing history on exit?
No.
Related
Edit: Thank you wOxxOm. It worked :)
chrome.tabs.move(XXX,{windowId:YYY, index:ZZZ})
Somehow I did not see the move option :(
I am writing simple Google Chrome web extension and I want to manipulate the tabs and windows. I actually want to be able to move a tab between the windows. The tab will have programatically spawned dynamic page, that I do not want to reload. The windowId is not listed in the modifiable properties chrome.tabs.
Am I missing something or it is currently not supported? What are the workarounds?
p.s. In extreme case also powershell or .Net might be acceptable (I have total control of the target PC). Currently spawning clearly distinguishable iframe over the web pages (background script injected and message listener) but the iframe gets reloaded, which I want to avoid.
p.p.s. Workaround might be to detect the currently active window and spawn new tab in the active window (if required), but this would require to save the page state, close the inactive tab and spown new one in the active window (this should be possible)
p.p.p.s. Main target is Google Chrome, but want it also for Microsoft Edge. Hopefully also for other browsers.
Edit: Thank you wOxxOm. It worked :)
chrome.tabs.move(XXX,{windowId:YYY, index:ZZZ})
Somehow I did not see the move option :(
I recently blocked quite a lot of ads across my entire network using AdGuard. Unfortunately, AdGuard does not prevent pop-up windows from opening. Although the advertising page is not called up, I get a popup which tells me that the requested page cannot be reached.
That's why I wanted to write a chrome extension that closes these popups automatically. Unfortunately, I fail to save the value of a checkbox in chrome.storage that is supposed to activate / deactivate the extension.
could someone help me here?
:EDIT
Okay i managed to store my value but now i'm running into the problem that i need to run a script when a page can't be loaded and i got no idea how i can do that. :S
Any Ideas? Is that even possible?
Right now I'm using Process.Start(URL_Here) to open a new page in the web browser - it will either open a browser or a new tab if one is already running. I was wondering, is there any reasonable (i.e. the one which won't require any 'hacks') way to re-use already opened tabs? - by "re-use" I mean a situation when f.e. www.google.com is already opened, I want to open a google page again, but instead of opening a new google tab it will redirect to the one that is already opened. Thanks for any help.
This sounds like standard browser behavior, and it's unlikely you'll be able to change it with simple command line arguments.
If you're willing to use Chrome and give every piece of data you transmit to The Company of Great Evil, then here's a plugin that can reuse a tab if you're using the same URL.
I am working on a website related to physically/psychologically abused person.
There is an emergency exit button available all time so the user can click on it before the "aggressive" person enter the room where the computer is located.
When the user click on the emergency button, the user is automatically redirected to Google with a query like "cooking apple pie" (this is an example).
Also, we would like to hide our website from the browser history in case the aggressive person check the history of the abused person. I think this cannot be done technically.
At least, can we generate fake browsing history to justify to the aggressive person the time that the user was on our website?
I tried multiple things to simulate a "browsing" like using an iframe or an ajax query to another website but none populate the browser history.
Is this can be done?
Thank you for your input!
I think you may be focusing too much on the browser and computer that you do not control and not enough on the content and the server that you do control. How about taking a different approach? Why not generate the pages for the user on the fly? The links are only good once. If you click on the home button (your escape key) and the aggressive person looks in the history the attempt to access them a second time could be made to display the weather or lottery results or something innocuous, Focus on what you have control over.
Useful Technical Details
Removing/Preventing Back Button Click History
You can allow the user to browse throughout a webpage without building up a history trail on the back button by having them click exclusively on javascript: links. This would still not remove any of the visited websites from their full browser history, so it's not a full solution.
Here's an example HTML JavaScript link:
CLICK HERE TO ESCAPE!
If this is acceptable, you could build an inoffensive homepage from which the user could access the site that would use JavaScript to send them to the real website. Every link on that new website would have to be a javascript link. Disadvantages of this would be that they would no longer be able to use the back button to navigate and that JavaScript is 100% required for the site to function.
Sanitized History
Make sure you have inoffensive titles and icons for any pages in the site so if the user does not delete their browser history they will not grab the attention of the third party.
Preventing Access to Protected Content
One option you have is to disguise your website as something else by having the user log in before they are allowed to access any of the content. You could save their session/login data in such a way that it is cleared if they hit an escape button it is erased or reset. As part of the login page, you could give users an alternate password to type in that would redirect them to fake content if their abuser becomes suspicious enough to demand they log in.
The session/login information should never save between browser sessions and always have a short expiration period, to further reduce the chances of the abuser gaining access to the website.
Disguising the Site
Considerations
If you choose to disguise the site either on the homepage or behind a "fake" login, be very careful to choose something that makes sense and would not arouse suspicion or interest. You don't want the fake page to be some sort of game or anything that might pique the third party's interest.
You also don't want it to look so boring or mundane that the original user would be hard-pressed to explain their possibly frequent visits. It shouldn't be anything so specific that the third party would think twice about the original user visiting it though. For example, it might be suspicious if someone who does not enjoy the great outdoors were to be visiting a page on mountain biking.
It also can't do something like just redirect them to Google without explaining the fact that they had to log in to access it.
General Advice
Private Browsing
Multiple sources have suggested either educating your target audience in how to use IE's InPrivate Browsing mode, Firefox's Private Browsing mode, or Chrome's Incognito mode.
There unfortunately does not appear to be a way to prevent the browser from keeping the current page in its browsing history through JavaScript. It's possible there might be some sort of plug-in or third-party control which would enable this, but it's probably just easier to get your users to use a private browsing mode.
Clearing History
Clearing a user's web history would not be possible since browsers restrict websites from accessing or altering data on the user's computer directly. Since the user's browser history is part of this data it would be a security issue if any website could clear the history.
You should provide instructions to your users for pruning or clearing their browser history, whether on the website itself before they enter, or through whatever resource you showed them how to access your website.
Generating a Fake History
If you need to generate a fake list of visited websites, you can always create new tabs/windows for the users (or possibly iframes) at timed intervals with JavaScript, but the user would have to disable their popup blocker for this to take effect.
Further Reading
Here is a helpful article on creating a useful Quick Disguised Exit From A Website. This forum thread that I found it on also had some useful information, but it's likely you've already seen it.
At least, can we generate fake browsing history to justify to the aggressive person the time that the user was on our website?
Have you cosidered turning it around?
What if technically all your pages and its content are about something else. So it is the content you want to hide that's loaded in a special way, making it easier for you to avoid having it in the browser history.
So then it becomes about knowing when to load/show the special content.
Above said, it's very important what #Frédéric Hamidi said:
Just keep in mind that if the "aggressive" person has control over that computer or the network, nothing can really prevent him/her from installing loggers on the machine or analyzing network traffic.
IE's InPrivate Browsing mode, Firefox's Private Browsing mode, and Chrome's Incognito mode
I would recommend this to prevent the abuser from finding the secret site in the browsing history.
Also, opening a social networking site and letting the browsing history collect that would be an excellent and believable excuse for the time spent on the computer.
I have a Chrome extension that opens a number of tabs, which it keeps open and uses to display data. I want those tabs to close when the extension is disabled or reloaded. My initial thought was that background.html would be unloaded when I restarted the plugin, but I can't seem to get anything that involves this to work. Any suggestions?
Chrome automatically closes pages with chrome-extension://<your_extension_id>/local.html urls (pages from the extension directory) when an extension is disabled. So if you can display your data using those pages - they will get closed. If it is some external site you are displaying - maybe you can make a local stub page with iframe and load your external site there.
Otherwise I can't think about any other way (besides having another extension watching this one).
i dont' know so much about chrome extensions, but, I think you are openning new windows by something like var w = window.open(params), so, you can close the window with w.close().
if not, ignore my answer :P