Instantly hide Chrome tabs with Panic Button

There are plenty of legitimate reasons why you might want to prevent others snooping on your web activities, and technologies like Chrome’s "incognito mode" can help maintain your browsing privacy.

These high-tech solutions still leave you with some very low-tech vulnerabilities, though, in particular others getting a glimpse of what you’re doing as they walk past.

Smart use of browser keyboard shortcuts can help out. In Chrome, pressing Alt+Home opens your home page, and pressing F11 displays the current site full-screen.

You could run another application full-screen. In Windows, for instance, press Win+E to launch Explorer. Maximize it, close the program window and it should restart full-screen next time.

Other options include pressing Win+D to display the desktop, or Win+M to minimize all the current program windows.

While these may work, suddenly pressing a hotkey while everything changes on the screen might look, well, suspicious. Panic Button is a free extension for Google Chrome which offers a more subtle approach.

Default operations couldn’t be simpler. The extension adds a button to your taskbar; clicking it hides all the open tabs and displays the "new tabs" page; clicking it again restores the previous tabs.

This can be tweaked via Panic Button’s options. The add-on may also be activated via a custom hotkey, and you can have it open your choice of URL.

Anti-snooping options include a setting to hide the toolbar button once it’s been clicked, and you can even password-protect any stored tabs to keep them safe.

None of this will stop determined attackers. If someone else has access to your computer or network they can see you’ve installed Panic Button from Chrome’s extensions list, and use many other ways to monitor what you’re doing. But the add-on does help protect you from casual glances and more basic snooping, and that’s enough to make it useful.

Panic Button is a free extension for Google Chrome.