Multiple Google Chrome Profiles

One of the hazards of being a software developer and of working for multiple clients is that you often have to juggle a large number of online accounts.

In particular many of our clients tend to use Google Apps for Work on their own domain. While 1Password alleviates a lot of the pain of managing so many accounts, you still need to decide which client apps to use for each service.

The most obvious dilemma is which email client(s) to use - I routinely need to have access to a personal account, a Go Free Range account and one or more client accounts. Over the years I’ve tried a bunch of tactics to manage my email accounts:-

• Forwarding emails to a single master account (possibly filtering into account-specific folders)
• Mail.app with multiple accounts
• A different email client app for each account e.g. Mail.app, Sparrow, Thunderbird
• Google’s webmail while signed in to multiple Google accounts

However, I’ve never been completely happy with any of these solutions. And towards the end of last year, I noticed that a couple of my colleagues were making use of a Google Chrome profile for each account and using Gmail’s webmail client.

I started doing the same and I’ve been much happier since. It means that as well as Gmail I can, for example, have different instances of apps like Google Calendar, Google Drive and Trello open in the relevant profiles.

The Mac keyboard shortcut (Cmd-Shift-M) is also pretty handy for switching between profiles.

I’m sure this approach isn’t news to most of you, but hopefully it might be useful to some people.

– James