Google's account management is infuriating!

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.

I especially “love” how you can see the content of public groups if you’re logged in, or never logged in.

But if google knows who you are and you’re not logged in at be moment? Hidden behind login page.

> resolve the union of identities

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...

I use Safari, which doesn't have profile handling at all. The web should not rely on clumsy browser hacks. Chrome profiles are way too coarse-grained — all the settings and state (history, bookmarks, etc.) are separate. It also interacts badly with everything else on a computer. If I click on a Slack link to a Google document, then nothing knows which Chrome window to open it in.

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.

I just setup multiple profiles in chrome which is one thing it seems to do better than FF imo. You can select a profile in the top right corner. Everything about them is separate. cookies, history, extensions , theme so I give each one a different theme make it clear what profile I'm using.

in FF afaict you can only use one at a time and you have to choose at launch

You can use multiple profiles at the same time through about:profiles

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...

Your comment has convinced me to do this. This is pretty fantastic. It was driving me nuts being signed into both work and personal gmails to access either my files or adwords. Not to mention YouTube which would open under the work account sometimes or drive. Plus now I can rip out all the work bookmarks and shove that into a work only profile.

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).

Chrome profiles are too coarse-grained: Not only is the entire window associated with that profile but each profile also has separate settings, histories, bookmarks, everything. All I'd want here are separate cookie spaces.

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.

Yep, tried to demo Google's new app builder and I couldn't get authenticated with the correct Google account after 10min and gave up.

Google drive is the biggest annoyance though with multiple accounts.

I have this problem with JIRA: ever since Google authentication was enabled there I can not login on two separate JIRA instances with the same browser.

This kind of defeats the purpose of 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).

I'm not begging anything of Google, but I would want them to make this work better.

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.

The average user has only one account. You are lucky that you even have the option of switching accounts.

Luckily for us, the developers at google are precisely the kind of people to have several accounts.

Yeah, but they probably get punished by managers for implementing unnecessary features. And that's probably why, even if we have one, the multiple accounts feature sucks so much.

For a long time you couldn’t switch between google accounts at all except via url manipulation.

Right, Chrome can't silo things like that between tabs, but can between windows using separate chrome profiles. Not as handy as container tabs but not horrible either.

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?)

If you have two windows, each with a different Chrome profile, that counts as a different session, right?

Correct

Supposedly you can be logged-in to multiple Google accounts but… it's very broken most of the time and works only for basic gmail browsing sadly.

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.

Not sure I understand. I routinely have a personal Google Drive tab and a work tab in Chrome. Ditto with email.

That's probably because your work account is a Google Apps account, which works much better especially for Drive (the problem is that you can't have more than one non-Apps account using drive at once in the same session. I have no idea why, but it seems to be deliberate). I'm unsure if the brokenness is fixed with Apps accounts on other Google services that are bad at handling multiple accounts.

There are occasions where Google’s native multi account management falls flat.

Especially surrounding Drive. I don't envy them, it's tough to get right.

Support for multiple accounts in drive is pretty great (minor papercuts here and there) as long as all but one of your accounts is an Apps account. This feels like an issue that they've fixed but not rolled out.

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.

I have had problems. I don't remember what I did but they went away. And now I use two accounts in Chrome routinely without issues.

stackdriver.com has to be one of the worst! selecting the right account just causes an infinite loop if the correct account isn't index[0] in your logged in accounts!

Is this a Google accounts feature or a browser feature? I switched to FF for Container Tabs, and use it for much more than Google accounts.

Two disconnected accounts.

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.

Sounds like you're using the Google Accounts feature, and using the [separate] browser profiles feature would exactly solve your problem.

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.)

> the thing that drove me to Firefox was the excellent Account Containers system

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.

As a counterpoint, in my use of Containers I'm very happy that history and bookmarks are shared.

> Google Drive files from my work don't randomly refuse to open because I'm also logged into my personal account

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 spent about three hours trying to figure out why apps scripts were breaking and refusing to open the editor until finally finding a helpful blog post: logged into multiple accounts? You may have trouble with apps scripting-something I had come to rely on with Sheets.

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?"

What does that mean in terms of resources? Is 2 FF tabs that much less taxing than 2 Chrome instances?

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.

Firefox supports both, completely separated browser profiles and these more lightweight Container Tabs.

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.

Can I have multiple profiles open at the same time?

Yeah, in about:profiles, there's a "Launch profile in new browser"-button.

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.

For me it’s Twitter. With container tabs, it’s so easy to manage multiple Twitter accounts. I couldn’t live without it.

Why don't you use TweetDeck?

https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

I didn’t know it supported multiple accounts. Not bad.

I don't think that's true. You can have a profile per window, the windows live in the same process.

Not even tabs usually live in the same process, so you must be misinterpreting something.

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.

per window. not per tab.