Google Chrome Canary Gets a New Profile Picker

Aug. 27, 2020

If you’re someone who prefers using multiple profiles inGoogle Chrome, there’s good news. The company is working toadd a new Profile picker interfacethat fires up when you open Chrome. This way, you can easily choose the profile you need, somewhat similar to Netflix’s profile picker implementation.

First spotted byTechdows, the feature currentlyexists behind Chrome flags in the latest Google Chrome Canary. With the new profile picker, you can choose the appropriate profile, create a new profile, or even browse as a guest.

To get started, you should enable twoChrome flags–New profile picker and Sign in profile creation flow. Head to chrome://flags, enable these flags, and restart the browser. The feature is functional on Chrome Canary version 87.0.4246.0.

If you try creating a new profile after enabling these flags, the dedicated Profile creation window will appear. First up, you can choose to toggle sync options and then, you can assign a name to the profile. The usual option to add the profile as a desktop shortcut is retained as well.

While this Profile picker is not really a significant new feature, it improves the experience while using multiple profiles. With this approach, you can easily get right into the profile you need without any additional workarounds like pinning the shortcut to the taskbar or adding a desktop shortcut.

We could expect the feature to roll out to the stable builds of Google Chrome in future updates. I hope it makes its way to other Chromium-based browsers such as the newMicrosoft Edgeas well.

Subin writes about consumer tech, software, and security. He secretly misses the headphone jack while pretending he’s better off with the wireless freedom.