Hacker News Reader

Comment by Androider | Hacker News Reader

Once again G Suite customers get the shaft.

I have a personal Gmail account, and a business G Suite account, and this change makes working with the two accounts a complete pain. All my years of Chrome bookmarks/settings/etc. are associated with my personal account, so I want the browser itself to always be logged in with that identity. But I want to be logged into my business G Suite email account "by default" when I hit gmail.com, when I open Google Analytics, Drive etc. so I don't have to use the account picker a hundred times a day. It just doesn't seem possible. Argh.

I wonder if Google employee accounts were to be considered business G Suite-like instead of consumer Gmail like, all these kinds of problems that constantly keep popping up for G Suite customers wouldn't be fixed overnight.

View on HN

Use Chrome Profiles feature which basically gives you an entirely separate browser. Each profile can be associated to an offline/local account or a Google account that syncs everywhere. It allows you to keep personal, work, and anything else completely separate.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824

This is not useful to me because it creates multiple windows. I don't want that separation. I want what I have now. It was very good.

You are looking for Firefox Containers. Single window, multiple profiles separated by colors in the tabs.

and every time you open a tab you have to open it via the container feature which gets irritating after exactly one time you forget to do it and just use ctrl+t

Does it actually work now? How do you manage two separate logins in a single window in Chrome. FF manages this with containers but I know of no way of doing this with Chrome.

I used to do this in chrome. You can click on your profile picture in the upper-right corner of the gmail UI to switch accounts. You end up having a different URL per user, like https://mail.google.com/mail/u/<number>, where <number> is 0 or 1 if you have two users. You can put these in bookmarks and have them open in different tabs.

This is called "multilogin". You sure can bookmark them, but if you ever happen to get logged out and then you log back into them in a different order, you'll find that the 0/1/2 really do refer simply to "the <N>th Google account I signed into", so your bookmarks might not work.

Yeah, I would just log out of all of them and log back in with the desired order if that happened. That doesn't happen very often though.

I have bookmarks for the usernames in the URLs, much better than hoping they stay in the same order.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/example@gmail.com

Awesome, thanks for the tip.

This also seems to work with non-Gmail URLs, where the "authuser" parameter is used (e.g. Google Analytics).

Haha I wish I just had two. I have 6 separate accounts, 4 for various businesses that I use regularly. I have a particular order I have to log into them when setting up a new chrome install so that all my bookmarks work with their respective accounts (&authuser=1, &authuser=4, etc) in things like google cloud console, google domains, gsuite etc.

Note: for actually checking my email, I have ended up using mailspring.

Same here but I use Firefox Containers. Lastpass for password, which is not container dependent so I can auto-login in whichever profile I am on.

> I wonder if Google employee accounts were to be considered business G Suite-like instead of consumer Gmail like, all these kinds of problems that constantly keep popping up for G Suite customers wouldn't be fixed overnight.

I'm not sure if this makes much of a difference to your case. I imagine most employees are using different profiles for work and personal. I always did this.. it makes for a nice firewall as well between accounts (never need to worry about awkward history when I present to co-workers).

add a profile? I have 6 chrome profiles. One for personal, business, Facebook, Twitter, Chromium, Other. 3 of those are associate with different google accounts

The most straightforward solution is to create a separate Chrome user/profile for your work account. It's a great way to keep your private and organizational accounts completely separate. You can even sync all Chrome settings, extensions, and bookmars though the company account if they allow you to use your own devices.

Unlike Firefox (major pain point btw), you can run Chrome with multiple profiles at once, each in a separate window.

But my workflow! https://xkcd.com/1172/

That's a good suggestion, but I just don't need or want to maintain two sets of bookmarks, install each plugin twice, configure each setting in two places, etc. But I guess I'll have to... sigh.

You could use the work profile you create exclusively for gmail and analytics, etc. That is, you could leave that profile pretty plain, not mainting bookmarks and plugins for it.

This is what I'm currently doing as a workaround, and it's still annoying.

Firefox has had profiles since at least 0.8, released in 2004, when it was renamed from Firebird, more than four and a half years prior to Google Chrome's release. This code, however, was inherited from Netscape Communicator 4, released more than a decade before Google Chrome. Hell, Netscape 4 predates Google!

However, since the profile code is so old, it is not accessible from the main interface; it must be accessed via a command line flag. Chrome learned from this mistake and exposed it in the graphical interface.

It is utterly false however to say that Firefox does not support profiles.

Firefox also has Multi-Account Containers add-on which is much more lightweight than profiles: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

Ah, yes, I forgot to mention that. This is basically Firefox learning from Chrome's mistakes after 10 years, just as Chrome learned from Netscape's mistakes. Chrome added in-browser support to profiles, then Firefox added preference and add-on sharing.

I don't quite understand your comment. I think you are assuming that Firefox's containers are like Chrome's profiles, but they're not.

I just wanted to add that I regularly run many different Firefox profiles in parallel, and it definitely supports that feature.

Granted the UI could use some work, but if you make a shortcut that brings up the profile selector it works pretty OK.

Firefox is most straight forward answer!

You might want to look into the custom URL feature of GSuite. https://support.google.com/a/answer/53340?hl=en

I have 2 accounts on my machine. One personal, one work. I’ll admit, I watch things on my personal machine (pornography) that I would not want mixed, even remotely, with my work stuff. Compartmentation.

For all of the features, paid G Suite users get the shaft. Google Home? Nope. Switching between accounts? Nope, that's a pain as well.

Just open your new Gmail and bookmark that page.

Log-out all your accounts from google, then the account you use the log-in first will be the account that gets logged in by default.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com