Hacker News Reader

http://giveupandusemultiplebrowsers.com/

I found this back in 2009, maybe 2010, when I was still "on the inside" and shared it around internally. Some people got a real kick out of it.

Now consider this: every single employee has a corp account, and I would think nearly every employee has a personal account, too. That means problems stemming from being in the right account have probably popped up in every single person's face for years now.

It didn't help when they changed from having the u@h up to just a name. Great. I know my name. I need to know which account I'm in.

Sorry.

That site is a little outdated because Chrome now natively supports multiple user profiles. Each profile gets its own icon and there's a user profile switcher next to your tabs. It's by far the best solution to the multiple accounts issue.

Thanks. I will look at this. Firefox is my preferred browser.

The google voice integration is by far the worst. I have to log into google voice, which then calls my gmail, which then calls whoever I want to.

You can have multiple Firefox profiles, but it's not very well integrated in the UI. I wish we could have one tab, or one window per profile, integrated.

Can you not simply make calls from the chat client in gmail?

How and where? Do you have to setup Chrome sync for this?

You don't need to set up sync.

Go to the Chrome settings page, and under the "Users" heading, choose "Add New User." Then you can pick an icon, that appears up in the browser's title bar. That icon helps you remember what user you're browsing under.

It might ask you if you want to setup sync after creating a user, but you can just close that window and it won't ask you again.

Click the icon in the top right corner of the title bar, and you can change what user you're browsing as at the moment.

Thanks, configured this but I was hoping something else. Turns out this is akin to creating a new FF profile user, which doesn't really resolve the Google Chrome auth issue directly, but nonetheless another dirty workaround for Google's horrible multiple account management.

Too bad not every Google Apps for Business setup works with Chrome Sync (or most Google software).

My company uses Google Apps for Business, but that basically means web services, because no actual software works. GChat, Chrome, etc all fail to recognize the account.

Yep just tried again: Invalid user name and password. Exact same entry as when logging into email except Chrome fails where gmail.com works. It simply will not accept the name/password of my Google Apps account on any Google software.

What a bummer, was hoping this was a fix for having multiple accounts.

You don't need to log into Chrome Sync to use the multiple profiles feature. You can even enable Sync on one profile (for your personal account) and leave it disabled on another (for your business account).

You might want to reach out to the person who admins your Google Apps domain, and see if they've explicitly disabled Chrome signin across all organizational accounts. And if so, whether it was on purpose.

To do so, have them visit:

www.google.com/a/cpanel/<your domain>/CPanelHome?pli=1#Organization/subtab=services

...and Ctrl-F "Google Chrome Sync"

Ugh if that's the case, then egg on Google's face for showing the user "Invalid user name and password" rather than saying (before even attempting to log in) "your domain administrator has disabled this feature".

It's also worth noting that "Google Talk" is a dependency for Chrome Sync; If they disabled talk years back, then Chrome Sync will also have been disabled.

If things like GChat and Chrome Sync aren't recognizing your Apps account, your administrator hasn't enabled those applications for your domain (you can turn on/off pretty much every Google service individually on a per-domain basis). I use both on my personal Apps account all the time, so it DOES work if enabled.

are you using your full user@domain.com username to login?

I use it some of the time, other times google balks at that type of login.

That's the only username I have for the Google Apps account: username@companyname.com

Didn't realize there was anything more than possible.

Is it possible that the admin has disabled the service for that domain?

This is pretty much what I do to circumvent the utter mess Google makes of it's logins.

It's also a matter of privacy. It has happened to me more than once that I did something like watching YouTube videos in the privacy of my own home, only to find out I was still logged into my company Google Apps account, which of course records my history.

Chrome makes it quite a bit easier with multiple user accounts - go to settings, scroll down, and add a user. You can run multiple at the same time (each gets its own window, can spawn new ones, etc), and they all have separate settings, extensions, etc. Very highly recommended if you're a Chrome user.

If you're on Firefox... seems like they only really care if you use their Profile Manager, which is a horrible alternative, but it does work reliably across all versions as long as you never ever ever launch the browser directly.

Or if you don't mind rewinding time a bit, and using OSX, http://www.stainlessapp.com/ (assuming it still works) has a brilliant idea: bookmarks can be associated with sessions. Have one for each account, run them all side-by-side in tabs, and it works great. I wish every browser would do this.

What a sad state of affairs that this is the most reliable solution to something as ubiquitous as logins.

How many other sites let you be logged into multiple accounts concurrently in the same browser session? Does Facebook? Microsoft? Amazon? (I genuinely haven't tried it).

That said, there's a lot that could be done to make multiple accounts easier to use. Personally, I use multiple Chrome profiles with one account per, just to minimize the "surprise" (and to keep, e.g., my corp account separate from my personal ones).

I do just that... But I'm on Linux so I can use two (or three) instances of the same browser, from different user accounts.

Linux makes it very easy to display apps from another user (which you authorize) on your graphical session. AFAICT this is just plain hell to do on OS X and on Windows (but blablabla X Window System is outdated, OS X rendering rocks, gnagnagna etc. Meanwhile I'm trivially surfing using different user accounts and this provides both conveniency and added security [any browser exploit now need also a local root exploit to be able to access sensitive data in the "real" user accounts]).

My professional email is using a SSH tunnel / transparent Squid proxy : anyone doing a reverse shall find my company through the IP (on purpose). I'm launching Chrome from my "professional" user account using the proxy setting (from the command line).

Then I've got another Chrome for my personal stuff.

And a throwaway VM with yet another Chrome.

I do the same on my Linux desktops. Not just chrome, but work and non-work data in general. I kind of assume Mac and Windows users have some reasonably easy way of doing the same thing. As a Linux user, it's trivial, but it's easy to lose sight of what's "trivial" for people who don't program or work in IT for a living.

> It seems that no matter which google service I'm using, I'm logged into the wrong account.

Can you give an example of a series of actions that leads to this? I'm logged into two separate Google accounts at pretty much all times, and I never run into trouble. I'm curious as to what the difference is between our two usage patterns.

It seems to happen when a session expires for one of the accounts. I keep my browser open for long periods and almost never reboot, and also have two accounts open, a gmail account and a school account. Generally there is no problem, but...

Scenario 1) I have both open, and log out of my gmail account. It redirects to my school's "goodbye" page. I just reproduced this. Not a huge problem, but indicative of a bigger issue.

Scenario 2) Now log out of the school account. I am greeted with a login for my gmail account. This is pretty close to the problem in Scenario 3, below.

Scenario 3) The real issue. The problem is not so much that it has happened, it's that there is no way to recover if you don't have the password. The other week I logged into my wife's laptop to grab a document from gmail to print, since it was hooked up to the printer. She didn't use it for the next few days. When she went to her work email's address (a .gov domain), it prompted her for my gmail password. There was no way to 'change account' at that point. No way to log out. Go to the .gov domain, get a prompt to login as <me>@gmail.com. No way to authenticate. I couldn't figure it out, and finally just logged in as myself then logged out, after which I was redirected to the .gov boodbye page, but it allowed her to log in after that.

Edit: Scenario 4) Go to www.gmail.com/a/umbc.edu, which the google help pages say is the correct way to go to the school's site. I just tried this, and it sent me to my gmail.com inbox. It is pretty much a crap shoot which mailbox I get when I first load the page. Sometimes it's aware I'm signed in under different IDs, sometimes not, so I can't always change accounts, and must go through login/logout hell to get them clear. Perhaps I could just clear my cookies but I don't like doing this en masse.

Yeah, there's something weird about the URLs to do with users. I've found myself regularly removing the /u/1/ part of G+ permalinks, for instance, which indicates that the user is being tracked oddly.

This happens to me all the time, my company hasn't allowed youtube (plus a swathe of other stuff). But youtube gets me annoyed the most. I usually get a hyped 'check this out' friend a friend on IM, then I have to spend what feels like an absurd amount of time swapping accounts and fighting against chrome modals which is always prompting the wrong account details for login. When I'm finished I have to log out and back into my work account. Total pain.

When you're logged into your work account (say, in GMail), does the URL contain /u/0 or /u/1? And how about your personal account?

Whichever one says /u/0 is the first one you logged in as, and that will be the default if you, say, open a new tab and paste in a bare link (without /u/ in it).

If you want that to be your personal account, you can make that your /u/0 account by doing this:

1. Log out of all your Google accounts

2. Log into your personal account

3. Click the picture in the upper-right

4. Click "add account"

5. Log into your work account

No way am I merging my work accounts, my personal business accounts, and my junk email together. Especially with a company already proven to slap happy deleting accounts they don't like.

Regarding your first sentence: Those instructions don't merge anything. All they do is swap the order of two accounts that someone is using multilogin with.

Regarding your second: Citation needed. There's this persistent rumor that if you make a G+ account with a fake-sounding name, Google will lock you out of your GMail and erase all your Google Docs, but as far as I've seen, those rumors have never checked out.

A quicker workaround might be an incognito tab.

For what it's worth, I do the same thing and have never run into trouble in years...

...until two or three days ago.

GMail flat-out refused to let me log into two accounts (it would end up in endless redirect when I tried the second one - I quit Chrome, fully cleared cookies, history, everything... it just would not work)

It seemed to have cleared up by the following day.

That's very similar to a bug YouTube has had for a while. It may be corrected - was still an issue within the past two months - but you would get into a loop where you could not log in to YouTube.

These types of things are what I think about when people tell me how great the Google programmers are, but that's another topic.

I would have agreed with you several years ago - but Google has vastly improved this across their services over the last two years. There are still holes, but I now can switch accounts in a single drop-down on most Google sites I use.

I still have problems with Google Wallet (aka Checkout) and Analytics seems to have it's own multi-account sign-in system.

One important thing to note about Wallet is that it will ask you to reauthenticate every 20 minutes. If that's not the problem, feel free to send me an email about it, and I'll do what I can to get it fixed (jrockway AT google.com).

At least you have the Gmail address you want. My desired username is in a "reserved" state, or something, in that it's linked to my account under "other usernames", and I can log in with it, but I can't create a Gmail account for it.

This all started when I decided to try Lively, of all things. It prompted me for a username, but I never would have entered what I did if I knew that that username would become the permanent name of my Google account.

I don't have the desired gmail that I want. my desired email is paddy@paddymullen.com. my gmail account has a ".gm" appended to the end to get a unique name.

I don't think there's many Google services any more where you can't use your apps for domains account. I stopped using my @gmail account years ago - in fact, I gave it to my father - and I can't remember having a problem using my Apps account. (Maybe with Google+ when it first came out?)

The split between a personal Google Apps account and a plain old GMail account was the worst for me. Anyone who lived through the era where Google Apps accounts weren't full-fledged Google accounts is in the same boat. The way I solved the problem is by not using my personal Google Apps account anymore. I forward the email to a GMail account and use that for all Google services. Google Now was the main reason I made the switch. It only supports one account, and it was easier to move my email and calendar that it would've been to move Voice and everything else.

There is a tool for moving Google Voice accounts between Google accounts: http://support.google.com/voice/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1...

I did this when I first started using Apps and the process went very smoothly.

It's kind of a major design flaw.. I'm getting pretty sick of having to educate everyone on which email address is associated with my... "main" Google+ account.

It'll only partly solve your problem, but you can have one profile current in incognito and another current in your normal window. This is what I do when someone wants to quickly check their fb/gmail while I'm logged in.

Chrome profiles solves this problem for me.