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Comment by rachelbythebay | 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.

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That site is a little outdated because Chrome now natively supports multiple user profiles.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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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