Snazzy Google Tricks
August 9, 2007 7:56 pmSo I’m a big fan of iGoogle, but ran into an issue with my new job at InfoWorld: there are Google productivity features that the team uses to coordinate activities, but we’re supposed to use an account based on our InfoWorld information, rather than our personal Google accounts. Fair enough, but I like to keep calendars and such open, and Google says that you can only be logged in to one account at a time. What’s a geek to do?
Well this geek started playing around and found that you can log in to two separate accounts as long as you use two separate browsers. Now, I use IE 7 for the work accounts and FireFox for the personal information, and everything seems to be working fine. If I can keep from having a third group that requires a separate account, I should be in good shape.
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2 Responses to “Snazzy Google Tricks”
There’s a better option — simply use two different browser profiles. I don’t know how to do this in IE, but hey, you’d rather use two copies of Firefox anyway, right?
First, create a new profile to run your secondary settings under:
File
Run
“firefox -ProfileManager”
(under OS X open a terminal and run: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -ProfileManager)
Rename or adjust your profile names so they’re obvious “Default” and “WorkGmail” or some such.
Then, just create launchers or bat scripts to run firefox with your alternate profile (using the -P ProfileName option to firefox). For bonus points, you could even change the icon or title bar so it’s more obvious which is which.
Of course, all the rest of your login cookies, session settings, etc, will be distinct. So you’ll want to try to remember to only use the firefox window that is not your default for the alternate google services and not other browsing. Running two totally different browsers does make this a bit more obvious, so maybe this trick is unnecessary for you. One advantage of this is if you have a website you’re concerned about the security of, create a new profile just for it. This type of approach can totally protect you from XSS or CSRF attacks because the browser only has a session with the suspect site, and doesn’t have access to all the cookies of your other sites.
Thanks for that tip, Jordan. I’m not sure why I’ve never done as much as I should have with profiles, but this could be the impetus for me to get started and figure out how to do things right. I like the security aspect, too–that’s not trivial when some of the things I’m doing involve my work.
Care to comment?