
One reason I dread Google doc shares - jmount
https://plus.google.com/113174802278825610073/posts/ff3uLcMrQxF
======
stevepike
The worst part of multiple google accounts is a bug (feature?) in the account
switcher widget. The flow is a two page thing where you first pick the account
you want to switch to and then enter your password on the next page. For some
reason they decided to add a feature where if you type the wrong password into
the second page, they check it against the rest of your accounts, and switch
you to any one that matches.

Even more annoying, the form has no username field (since you already picked
it on the first page), which causes my password manager to pick the most
recently used one and log me back in as the account I was trying to switch
away from!

------
ikhare
Chrome has a concept of multiple users in it's preferences. When you turn it
on then you can pick an icon per account and it shows up on the top right of
the browser window. To switch to a different user click on that and switch to
a different user. Each user can sign into a different google account.

Each user has it's own cookies, chrome extensions etc. Keeps work and personal
accounts very separate.

~~~
euank
Firefox has an even more powerful version of this.

If you start firefox with the "-P" flag you can choose to create a new
profile. You can also pass it an argument (e.g. firefox -P default) to choose
one.

In this case, the profiles are completely disparate; there is zero overlap. In
this case, you simply have to login to one google account per window and paste
into the correct window (still not ideal).

To run multiple profiles at once, launch all profiles after the first one with
"firefox --no-remote -P <profile-name>". Clicking links will open them with
the firefox that was launched without "\--no-remote".

~~~
delroth
How is it more powerful? This is exactly the same thing, but apparently with a
worse UI (the multiple profile thing in Chrome is exposed through the UI).

~~~
euank
The firefox instances have completely different processes, settings, etc.
Everything. Chrome, unless I'm mistaken, does not go that far.

For example, one of my main uses of multiple-profiles is that I have a
different profile for every proxy I use. I can launch a firefox profile that's
proxied side-by-side with my usual firefox (aside, the firefox proxy settings
are exposed via the UI, unlike chrome).

Chrome, I'd have to run "google-chrome-stable --proxy-server=$proxy" and then,
again unless I'm mistaken, all accounts will use that proxy server. That, by
itself, is a deal breaker.

I'm not familiar enough with chrome's settings and so on to say what does and
doesn't leak; I could be completely wrong on all of this, but I suspect I'm
correct.

Edit: On looking more, Chrome's does look more complete than I thought. The
proxy bit still is a dealbreaker for me (well, and I'm adverse to logging into
a google account), but I retract much of what I said.

~~~
barrkel
Have you tried FoxyProxy Firefox extension?

~~~
euank
I haven't used it in a long time, but I did use it at one point.

It's just not as good security and privacy-wise. Using proxies on/off on one
profile, as it encourages, results in any tracking cookies seeing both IPs
having the same tracking data, and thus your proxy has lost some of its
privacy.

I also run entirely different extensions when I'm going for privacy vs fun
browsing vs banking etc etc.

If you just want proxies to get around some region restriction and don't
really care about the privacy or security aspects, then FoxyProxy might be
fine.

------
danudey
I've had this issue constantly, as I have three separate accounts (work,
personal gmail, and non-gmail google account). Lately, I had one of the worst
situations though.

Coworker sent me an invitation to join a calendar. I click the link, it takes
me to my personal gmail calendar page and pops up a dialog saying 'You don't
have access to this!'.

I close the dialog, then click on the account change thing to switch over to
my main account, and close the old tab. Click the link again. Opens my
personal calendar again. I had to log out of everything then log into this
account (all of this manually) before I could view the calendar.

Thankfully I didn't care enough and ignored the calendar invite.

~~~
jmount
Emailed Google calendar invite is an even bigger bag of pain. They include two
".ics" attachments (one called "Mail Attachment.ics" and one called
"invite.ics", leaving you wonder which one to use). If you try clicking the
"Yes" in the email invite and you are not logged into the correct Google+
identity you get an HTML splash that says "Google Calendar invitations cannot
be forwarded via email" (and no links to break out of that. If you load the
ICS into iCal you can accept the meeting (and the sender seems to see that, so
there must actually be no useful account based security in play). I thought
about filming that one- but I don't want to go through those steps again.

I think it is fair to evaluate Google tools in a mixed environment. To assume
a pure-Google environment is to assume away all other options and choices.

------
influx
Do Google employees actually use any of this stuff? The workflows are
terrible, I can't imagine they aren't bothered by these same problems.

~~~
autokad
you're talking about a google team that tested chrome on over 5,000 of its
employees and not one of them bothered to open hotmail (the most popular email
at the time). This was when chrome first premiered, and many popular websites
didnt work in chrome.

I'm sure they use it plenty, just all in the same exact way. i have this
problem because i have my personal and 2 work accounts that are customer
specific.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
They seem to eat only their own dog food.

~~~
gcb0
true. they also brain wash most of their workforce to a dedication to the
company you haven't seen since japan in the 70s... so my guess is that all
google employees only ever have their work @google.com gmail account. ever.

------
andrewljohnson
I had the same issues with Google Docs, but now I always share documents as
"public if you have the link," and send out a link. I have yet to regret
trusting people to keep documents as private as I request.

I also just email people URLs to hangouts, instead of going through any Google
UI. That also works without fail.

~~~
mixedbit
> I have yet to regret trusting people to keep documents as private as I
> request.

Keeping shared content private is always to a large extend a matter of social
trust. No technological solution can fully enforce permissions that you have
chosen. Even if you require Google login and explicitly specify a group of
people that can access a document, an allowed person can still copy-paste the
content and share it with a larger group, or simply tell others about the
content.

~~~
munin
IME it's less about the content leaking and more about an anonymous party
making weird edits to the document and you not noticing

------
philjackson
As a Linux user I breathe a sigh of relief when I get a Docs link rather than
a complicated pptx file that won't render properly and I can't edit.

~~~
jmount
Can't Libre office deal with pptx by now?

~~~
aroman
It always could 'deal with it', the issue is getting it to render identically
to PowerPoint, which is virtually impossible to accomplish for non-trivial
presentations, it seems. Likewise for other Office files. iWork has the same
problem.

~~~
jmount
But surely Google docs presentations are fairly non-repeatable across
browsers, operating systems, and years.

~~~
philjackson
All "modern" browsers render Docs well. Not sure what difference the OS makes,
after all, it's just a vessel for the browser's rendering engine.

~~~
dan15
Font rendering can differ between different OSes but it's usually not too bad.

------
bowlofpetunias
Google account switching is an insane nightmare. Sometimes I log out from
account A, log in to account B, go to some Google service only to magically
find myself to be in account A again.

Not only that, there is simply no way to go where I need to go as B, so I just
have to use a different browser to make that happen.

And don't even get me started with Google's cross-account and cross-service
messing with language and locale settings. I can to a certain extend
understand Google's "the user is an idiot, so we'll make his choices for him"
approach, but to constantly override explicit choices and settings is
ridiculous.

------
dror
That's one of the reasons I use Firefox for my personal account(s) and chrome
for work. Almost never have to deal with this issue. Periodically, I do need
to switch on the personal side (I have 4-5 different google accounts), but i
have lastpass remember it all in the browser which makes it pretty painless.

~~~
thejosh
Yep, or have another profile setup in Chrome that makes this super handy.

------
natch
Many people seem to think you choose a browser, and once you have chosen a
browser, you can no longer use other browsers.

The author of the article seems to be one of these people.

He could just have a different browser he uses for whatever his current top
client is. Yes he would have to log in and out for different clients, but at
least this would reduce the annoyance a lot compared to doing it all in one
browser.

~~~
jmount
You can choose your browser. Except in some cases where your employer chooses
your browser instead of you. And about half of the problems in the video had
nothing to do with the browser (like not being able to switch accounts on
Google's own "switch accounts" page without logging out first).

------
kyrra
Maybe I'm missing something, but why do so many of you have 2+ Google accounts
that you use regularly. Maybe business vs personal? If so, why mix them on the
same computer user account?

~~~
justincormack
You read your personal email at work, or you collaborate with other people, or
you are freelance. I have 3 google accounts, mostly use 2 and its annoying.

Also if you use chrome and use the same login it is hard to separate them.

------
lnanek2
I have the same problem. Every time I go to Google Docs it keeps making me
choose a user, then I choose a user, then it doesn't let me in and makes me
choose again. It does this even for the root subdomain. I end up having to
open any Google Docs URL with a different browser where I only ever login with
one account. One of the several accounts it always tries to use isn't even
active any more, it's an expired Google Apps account from back when they
started charging and it still always offers it even if I'm signed out.

------
johansch
Now that Google is so entrenched both in personal and corporate life, they
really need to step up to handle ALL of the corner cases.

~~~
danudey
The Google assumption seems to be that you have one Google account, which is
your singular identity. The reality for many people is that they have multiple
Google accounts, none of which is their singular identity. The multi-account
support they've added only serves to inadvertently spread your data across
multiple accounts, rather than make it easier to work with them.

As an example, I ended up on YouTube the other day and, for some reason, was
logged into my work Google account; curious, I clicked on 'Favorites' and
found that some videos that I'd favourited once (and later been unable to
find) were favourited there. Frustrating. There was also a moderate browsing
history of videos, some of which I had likewise been looking for in the past.

Honestly, if it weren't for YouTube favourites I probably wouldn't log into
any Google websites at all.

------
onethumb
I asked Sundar Pichai about this at D10 in May, 2012 (see
[http://allthingsd.com/20120702/googles-wojcicki-and-
pichai-o...](http://allthingsd.com/20120702/googles-wojcicki-and-pichai-on-
the-full-d10-interview-video/) @ ~35:40) and he said within 3 months they'd
improve it... Still waiting. :(

------
wudf
I use different browsers for each google account. It's a real pain in my ass.

~~~
euank
You can easily use a firefox profile per account rather than a browser per
account and end up in roughly the same boat.

Just start firefox with "firefox -P" to create a new profile, and run "firefox
--no-remote -P" on a new instance of firefox and choose that profile to run it
side-by-side with your first, but with no data overlapping.

------
braindead_in
I always open the link in an incognito window and login with the email it was
shared with. Have to re-login, but works without fail. And I don't have to
logout of other accounts.

~~~
stretchwithme
Also great for reading nytimes.com.

------
cromwellian
Chrome Profiles are a superior solution to having different tabs logged into
different accounts, because it is very easy to make a mistake compared to
profiles with different themes.

------
waleedka
Same with Google+. I always get Hangout invites to the wrong Google account,
and then we spend 10 minutes trying to get the call started and eventually
switch to Skype.

------
grobot
Gmail login screen makes Google's position on your situation pretty clear.

At the top it says "One account. All of Google."

At the bottom it says "One Google Account for everything Google".

------
tim333
I've just had great fun trying to test in app purchases on an android app with
multiple Google accounts. They don't make these things terribly simple.

------
gcb0
great. now matt will see this post, demand changes, and they will screw up
even more. anyone who ever had a personal and a google for domain accounts two
or more years ago know what im talking about. they forced everyone to unify
and killed one... it was hell with all my domains.

------
alexpomer
You could also just request access for the Google account you're using.

------
bgruber
i don't mean to dismiss this guy's gripe, cause obviously it does not work
well for him, but for me, this "just works."

with a little experimentation, it seems that everything becomes horrible if
you're not already logged in to the google account you need to use. if I am, I
get exactly the desired result even if my only open tabs are using a different
google account.

------
felixrieseberg
Google Docs is a neat tool and I love their mobile apps, but if you're
interested in checking out alternatives, I can recommend Office Online . It's
pretty neat. And free.

[https://office.com/start/default.aspx](https://office.com/start/default.aspx)

~~~
jacquesm
"Hey guys, Felix from Microsoft here."

Maybe you should have disclosed that you work for MS in your comment?

~~~
felixrieseberg
Didn't mean to annoy anyone, I'm nowhere near the office team. The downvotes
speak for themselves though, so I guess apologies are in order.

~~~
jacquesm
Microsoft has been caught astro-turfing on HN before, you really don't want to
be lumped in with that lot so if you can resist the temptation to plug
microsoft products in threads about competitors it would be a benefit to
everybody (even to Microsoft).

