On: Upcoming 'Supervised User' Feature of Google Chrome

I have a personal and a corporate Gmail account, and I want to keep them separate, with their own bookmarks and extensions.

I also don't want to shutdown all of my running applications just to switch.

I can understand the use case of having a personal & corporate Gmail. However, thats still a solved problem; Google has a multi-user account signin option.

This incessant integration of google specific features into the browser is essentially the same thing as vendor-lockin.

Multi-login doesn't solve the problem of separate bookmarks, extensions, saved passwords, etc.

What exactly is "google specific" about it? Firefox supports multiple profiles, too. I'm sure they can add a supervised account feature if they think their users want it.

It requires using special command-line flags (default behavior of Firefox prevents running multiple sessions concurrently, on purpose). It is also, performance-wise, was not so good.

I am a diehard Firefox user, and I only use this crap feature on Chromium anyway. Firefox is what I use for my personal lif, as it is in my opinion a better browser, but a more trustworthy org. Chromium/Chrome is for work, and I do not entrust Google for anything more than that these days

Multi-user is hilariously broken on the products where it is implemented, and not implemented on most Google products.

Same reason I use it. Our office insisted on using Google Apps, and this is the only way I can manage multiple email accounts effectively (using Chromium though; I do not use Chrome, because I do not trust their "only so much source" approach, and thus use the free bits only).

you might want to take off that tinfoil at some point, let your brain breathe

Thanks for trolling. It is not tinfoil hat. I just prefer to use open source and see the WIP of Chrome, which I get by downloading the nightly alphaware. I find security in open source not because I distrust Google, but I trust the open source development model to be more transparent. You can disagree, but I thought that was a common viewpoint on HN. But it is ok to make fun of me for it.

But I guess my brain does not breath as much as yours.

way to put someone down for being not only security aware, but principled as well.

You can just use multiple browsers

You can do this with chrome using the --user-data-dir option, which works fantastically well. For my work gmail I have the following shortcut:

chromium-browser --user-data-dir=~/.profiles/work-mail-profile -app=https://mail.google.com

But why would you want to do that instead of just using the built-in multiple profiles feature? The only thing I've encountered that required a separate browser instance was using non-default command-line flags for testing something with different proxy options.

Why would I do that when I want to use Chrome only?

I can have both my Github accounts logged in, both of my gmails, etc, and get my favorite interface. I'm glad I don't have to launch Firefox or Safari anymore.