Comment by i2shar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by i2shar | Hacker News Reader

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It's about privacy and also about taking away functionality that worked all these years for me. At work we use Google Apps and I sign in as with my work address for Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, etc. and am used to one click access to all these apps. But I like to sync my bookmarks, extensions and settings to my personal account - and that's it - I don't want to sign in to my personal Gmail, Docs, Drive in the browser. The new Chrome not only forces me to, but it now makes my personal account the primary one (/u/0 for Gmail) and forces me to go through several clicks for other apps to change accounts. And they didn't even ask before pushing this - one fine day Chrome auto updated and forced this feature on me and it took several days and a lot of signing out/in deleting cookies, posting on groups, etc. to figure out the flags workaround.

I know the following is not welcome on HN, but I have to vent somewhere folks that think this was a good idea are reading, so here it is: A big fuck you to Chrome for forcing this feature on us!

Firefox with the "Multi-Account Containers" add-on is pretty great for managing multiple identities. Browser tabs get labels (with color-coded stripes) for which container they belong to.

I can ignore identity switchers provided by a site (google in this case) and just keep two gmail tabs, one for personal and one for work, open right next to one another. Firefox keeps each one sandboxed with its own session info like cookies etc.

Just. use. Firefox.

I'll never understand this hesitation to Firefox, some people will bring out why Firefox is evil yet Chrome is clearly not the lesser evil product. I started using Chrome when it first came out, and then I stopped using it when it didn't have adblocking. Then when it did have adblocking it was extremely limited (I kept seeing popups and other nuisances), this was when I got dispelled then about Google being an ad focused company and never went back. I only use Chrome / Chromium (on Linux) to test web dev projects across major browsers, and sometimes Stack Overflow if I'm testing on Chrome might as well, but it's nothing all that special.

My main browsing has always been done on Firefox which has sync much like Chrome does, but oh look it's encrypted, forgot my password? Too bad, they're going to nuke my data since they don't even know my password. As it should be. My browsing data being synched is cool but it's not that precious to me, and if it was I would just not forget my password.

Also if I need to use Google services I have a Google container, if I need to use Firefox, I have a Firefox container. Good luck containing Google or Firefox on Chrome that way, and the multiple account containers are amazing for testing multiple user roles on web development projects all on one browser with multiple taps opened.

> I'll never understand this hesitation to Firefox

In my case, I don‘t switch to Firefox because they don’t support AppleScript and it’s a feature I use every day.

Less than an hour ago, on another HN thread, I saw another macOS user claiming they won’t switch to Firefox because it doesn’t support Keychain.

Every time there’s this conversation, I see a bunch of macOS users complaining about performance.

In sum, a bunch of users (particularly macOS users) don’t switch to Firefox because it plain sucks for their needs.

Be sure to turn off telemetry. Also, the other elements that can send browsing data to google, which are fortunately customizable in firefox.

People get set in their ways. We're not all web developers.

Not sure if this is a solution for you but you can have multiple Google account sessions in separate Chrome user sessions by clicking your user icon at the top then selecting to add people.

It becomes a game of “guess what user I’ll be logged in the next new window ?”

Chrome also doesn’t respect window order in the menu, so it’s just a pain to track when switching. My solution to that was to switch to Safari for personal use.

I have like 3 accounts added and it always used default account

What's a default account?

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