14 DAY TRIAL // An interesting new feature has finally shown up in Google Chrome and Chromium, the ability to run multiple browser profiles at the same time. This enables more users to share the same browser install or one user to separate work websites from regular ones and so on.
The feature has been a long time coming and Google has experimented with it for quite some time, since shortly after Chrome was launched.
More recently though, the team started working on the current iteration which was laid out and detailed in a Google Chrome design document half a year ago.
The feature is now ready for testing and has been added to Chromium and Google Chrome 13, which have just been pushed out. Some parts of the feature had been working already, but it is now officially available, although not enabled by default.
With Chrome 11 hitting the stable channel last week, Google Chrome 12 is heading towards the beta channel. It's not quite there yet, but a beta should be coming as early as this week.
This means that Google Chrome 13 will be hitting the dev channel any time now. For the moment, you can grab the latest Chromium builds or Google Chrome Canary Build which have already been upgraded to the new version number.
Both version support the multiple-profiles feature, which is hidden inside the about:flags section. Having it enabled allows users to use different profiles, everything from preferences to bookmarks to stored passwords, in different browser windows.
Each profile is associated with a separate Google account which means that, yes, you do need multiple Google accounts to use the feature. Synced data will be stored in the cloud via the different accounts too.
This may seem like an inconvenience if you just want a different set of preferences or bookmarks depending on what you're doing or where you are, work, research, browsing, social networking and so on. It does, however, make plenty of sense if more than one people will be using the same browser, the profiles need to be completely separate.
