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Google Chrome supports both multiple users and multiple browser user profiles. To add to the confusion, the end of the latter Google Support page reads:
Creating a new Chrome user is another quick way to create a new browser user profile. Learn how to add a new user in Chrome [N.B. which links to the page on multiple users]
What exactly are the differences and pros & cons of each, aside from how they're created?
Labnol seems to superficially cover the topic, implying in a March 2012 article there is a difference in password and browsing history storage. I've created a profile via Chrome's Settings mechanism, and a new directory was created in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\
. That's exactly what Labnol instructs you to do the hard way. That new profile did not inherit anything from the Default profile. The history was empty, and there were no passwords stored. This suggests that the Labnol article is wrong. It instructs on to copy the Default profile directory, which will, of course, copy the history. Finally, the claim that "Unlike Firefox that ships with a Profile Manager, you can only manually create user profiles in Google Chrome.", is patently obsolete.
Furthermore, Chrome 26 created a shortcut on the desktop launching chrome.exe
with the --profile-directory
parameter, not with the --user-data-dir
suggested by Labnol. The latter, however, is documented by Chromium.
I'm not sure that's the case. What you describe are Windows users (which lead to completely different Google Chrome users/profiles/whatever because of different
– Dan Dascalescu – 2013-04-28T03:30:00.143c:\users\<username>\Google\Chrome
directories they're stored in, while the confusion I ran into is Chrome's own user profiles system. Do you have a citation?The confusion you might have come from not understanding the multiple users explanation page you've linked to. still writing... – JasonXA – 2013-04-28T03:37:47.680
"Manage multiple users on Chrome" shows how to create multiple users, each of those will be stored in the same profile location. Create a new browser user profile shows exactly that, how to create/restore/backup a profile location where each profile's users are stored, it can only be changed if a new system user is used or if used like this --user-data-dir=C:\foo where C:\foo is the equivalent of 'C:\Users<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data' stored on a thumb drive for ex or in a TrueCrypt container. – JasonXA – 2013-04-28T03:49:49.913