(Chrome has no solution for containing accounts across tabs, last I checked. You have to spawn entire new Chrome instances.)
First, it almost never remembers what account you used with what service. If I do some Google Cloud stuff under my work account, I don't want Google Maps using my work account, or vice versa. The list of accounts in the upper right corner, and what's signed in/out, seems completely random and broken.
The second problem is that Google's various apps are wildly inconsistent in how they deal with multiple accounts. Some (like Maps) have apparently been "modernized". Others (like BigQuery; I've had issues with Google Drive, too) don't understand multiple accounts at all. It doesn't matter that you sign into a work account. Open that app and it will use some other account.
A sign they've not mastered this at all is that it doesn't work at the URL level. You can bookmark a Google Docs document, for example, and then switch your accounts. Going to the bookmark (or just going back) to the Docs page gives you a "permission denied" error because you're using the wrong account. Same thing with sharing URLs — if someone at work sends me a Google Docs URL, it's bound to not work because it'll try to use what I try to keep as my default account, which is my personal one. Sometimes I just munge the "authuser=1" part in the URL.
It's amazing that a Google app can't simply resolve the union of identities you're signed in as. I have two accounts, work and personal, and one of them has access, after all.
I might consider FF just to work around this.
But if google knows who you are and you’re not logged in at be moment? Hidden behind login page.
I dont want this, it's better to be explicit with the accounts. However they are just using cookies and Chrome gives each "profile" a separate cookie container which works well and I prefer it to the mess it would be at the tab level. I have separate window profiles for work and personal and can keep everything (including passwords) completely separate.
BigQuery has a new UI built into the console: https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery
You might need to sign up for the alpha/beta test: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf6hyfvoWZ8eUbbKWq9...
Google's mistake was the account switcher. Supporting multiple accounts is fine, but pretending they support concurrent logins is nonsensical.
But I have no choice to use multipel Google accounts, since my company uses Google Apps or G-Suite or Google For Work or whatever it is called today, and I'm consulting for a third company that also does this.
in FF afaict you can only use one at a time and you have to choose at launch
That said, do try multi-account containers, unless you really rely on extensions and theme being different per profile - they're great: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
My only concern now is with using multiple devices. Do I just sign into to both profiles on each device? I only worry because there was a big snafu that occurred with their password manager that synced nothing and everything disappeared. (I no longer trust google with that stuff).
Firefox profiles are similar to Chrome's. But the container tabs that people are talking about in this thread are better than Chrome profiles. They're per tab, and last I checked they only separate out cookies and local storage.
Google drive is the biggest annoyance though with multiple accounts.
Remember, we started to have them to separate our work/home/personal lives, to build separate digital profiles that companies (like Google) store on their servers. Now you beg Google to recognize and unify them (which I guess they have almost done already by themselves).
Google accounts are not just about data and personalities, but also about permissions. As long as I'm "logged into" multiple accounts, it should be able to map the content I'm trying to see to an account. Or at least offer to switch to that account. For example, if I'm trying to view a company document, but my default account is my personal account, then I don't want to see an often obscure "permission to view denied" error, which always freaks me out and makes me think I've been locked out or something.
Better yet, build this badly-needed auth stuff into the browser and allow apps to negotiate access with the browser.
Agree that you shouldn't try mixing personal and Google apps account in the same session...it always breaks eventually. (Why can't Google get that right?)
And containers in firefox are simply amazing! I use it very often to access "admin accounts" on the occasion without the hurdle to use private browsing.
Except this has been a problem for years, and according to a friend of mine who's had a "personal" Apps account from back when it was free, never has been a problem for Apps users, so I'm not sure what's going on on their end.
ADDED: In general a lot of services don't handle multiple accounts terribly well. I've had issues with Wordpress as well. I actually have two different soft-key authenticator programs related to making personal and work accounts play nice.
In particular: you can log into different profiles in the browser (each window can be associated with up to one profile, and they can be different), by clicking the little "Sign In" tab in the upper right corner. See also https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en&co=GE....
You can then open tabs under the different profiles with right-click, "Open link as", and selecting the appropriate profile.
(Personally, once I tried profiles, I never touched multiple-accounts-logged-in again.)
Though unfortunately, history and bookmarks are not isolated to their individual containers, and Firefox's profile management system is a PITA compared to Chrome's easy button in the title bar.
Ugh, this is a common problem apparently. Why can't they just make it open files from my org domain using the only org account I'm logged into. >:(
I wouldn't call it 'infuriating', but it's something that I can't figure out "how does this of all things break this of all things?"
fwiw, I use multiple Chromes, each with its own project / client, own password manager, etc. I don't think I could maintain the silos I do with FF. I wish I could sack Google (Chrome) but I can't, afaik.
You can type "about:profiles" into the URL-bar to manage your profiles (which you can also bookmark for easier access).
You can also run "firefox -P" in a terminal to access a similar GUI. With "firefox -P profile_name", you can start a specific profile. To run multiple profiles in parallel from the CLI, you have to start further profiles with "firefox -P profile_name --new-instance" (Linux) or "firefox.exe -P profile_name --no-remote" (Windows). This is because when you click on a link in an application, it needs to know in which browser instance to open that link.
As for resource usage, the profiles separate everything. Browsing history, bookmarks, logins, add-ons etc. It's essentially like a second Firefox installation. This also means that it actually runs two instances, so twice the RAM usage and somewhat more CPU usage to move that data around.
The Container Tabs on the other hand only separate what needs to be separated in order to look towards webpages like two different browsers. So, there's a different cookie jar, different localStorage, different HTML5 Web Storage etc., but other than that it's the same as just opening two tabs. So, probably not even 1% more RAM usage than using Firefox without any separation.
For launching multiple profiles in parallel from the command-line, I already tried to explain it in my previous comment, though it is more finicky that way.
I think, the Windows Task Manager groups processes in the most stupid of ways, where when a (parent-)process has spawned many child-processes, then only the parent-process and its resource usage is shown. You have to go into the "Processes"-tab to see all Chrome-processes and manually add up their resource usage.