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Comment by Androider

8 years ago

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.

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.

    • 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.

      5 replies →

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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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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.

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.