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Safari browser profiles - Hurrah!!
- Thread starter CalMin
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Coherence X is the way to go for real work and organization. Still a touch quirky in some areas, but a savior for keeping work and projects separated out appropriately. Nice to have dedicated browsers for "shopping", client a, client b, Facebook, or other things that you want to keep appropriately isolated and up at the same time without dealing with profile headaches that ultimately create nightmares in things like Chromium or Firefox-based browsers.
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IMHO, I couldn't find a toggle to switch between different profiles. Maybe it will be added in later betas, but it is not there in this 1st developer beta (at least there is no UI button that I can find).
Have you set up a profile to start? Looks like you need to create a new profile first (Settings > Profiles), then the button should appear on the Safari toolbar (might only appear if you have more than one profile, maybe).
Worked for me, though seems a bit buggy as Safari crashed when I was changing the Start Page background.
It’s definitely buggy - button disappeared for me when I restarted Safari. Might leave this feature for beta 2 🤣
The cumbersome workaround is to click on File > New Work Window/New Personal Window, it seems:
I think I got carpal tunnel just from looking at that shortcut key combination.
Yeah can confirm running macOS 14 on my main laptop and profiles are bugged. You have to go into file then "new *profile name* window" but then when you're in the profile, when you click on the profile menu bar area thingy you can't switch back to "no profile" windows. It is very very very odd.
I really like this feature, but what is the difference between this and group tabs??? I really don't get it!!
Basically, let's say there's a website where you have two different accounts. E.g. Microsoft365. Let's say two Microsoft365 accounts, one for work, one for personal. Currently, if I need to switch accounts, I need to log-off one account, and then log-in on the second account. With browser profiles, each profile is its own separate browser world, with its own cookies and settings. I can be logged into both accounts side by side if they are running in different profiles.
You can test this out in Chrome, Edge or Brave right now if you're really curious about it.
My preferred browser is Safari, so the only reason I even run Edge or Chrome is because it allows for profiles.
Thanks, also created profiles, and the "button" is not showing. Definitely a cumbersome work around so I will just pretend they do not exist for now.
Oh..... so it also separates its browsing history? So basically if you wanna search for, you know, you don't need open a private browser?
No, because unlike private browsing, the history will be kept (and viewable/searchable).
In the current situation, imagine the following:
- you have one computer
- you want to browse your personal sites, facebook, gmail, macrumors, your personal office365 account... and your work sites... offce365 (for work), some portal for your work etc
- you don't want to mix up your cookies or constantly login/logout of Office365
- you don't want facebook to track the sites you view for work (yeah nobody cares anymore, sadly...)
- in fact, you'd rather not be logged in to facebook when you browse any other site
- you want to keep your personal bookmarks as a separate list of bookmarks/favorites from your personal ones
One way to accomplish this (and currently the only way on iOS/iPadOS) is to use 2 completely different web browsers. E.g. you use Safari for all your personal browsing, and Chrome for your work browsing. These 2 browsers have completely separate cookies, bookmarks, history, etc, and whatever you do in one browser does not "leak" into the other browser.
With profiles (features that already exist in Chromium-based browsers, in Firefox, in Orion, etc), you can use the SAME browser but still have the same advantage of keeping all those things separate.
Now Apple will bring this to Safari on macOS, and iOS/iPadOS (something no other browser has done on iOS/iPadOS, so far, as far as I know)
Will each profile have it's own http/s proxy setting like Google Chrome and Firefox do? I connect to different networks for personal and work browsing, and I use proxy servers for each network I need to connect to.
Example: docker container for each network that connect to different networks via VPN and also runs a proxy server so I can browse Web UI's on that network. This let's me connect so several VPN's at once without connecting my entire workstation to any of them.
I create a separate browser profile with unique proxy settings ( and bookmarks!) for each network I need to connect to. It works great, but it does prevent me from using Safari as it uses system-wide proxy settings.
Example: docker container for each network that connect to different networks via VPN and also runs a proxy server so I can browse Web UI's on that network. This let's me connect so several VPN's at once without connecting my entire workstation to any of them.
I create a separate browser profile with unique proxy settings ( and bookmarks!) for each network I need to connect to. It works great, but it does prevent me from using Safari as it uses system-wide proxy settings.
I get the feeling this is how it will stay. Similar to how of Mac you can't go into Private browsing without opening a new window.
It's one of those features that only a certain category of people will really benefit from, but they *really* benefit from it.
For me, while working, I need to use multiple online IDs. I have one google ID I use to manage the GCP account for our company. I have two different google IDs I use to manage two google groups accounts. And I have my own personal google ID.
Without profiles, it's a real, major, pain in the butt to try to use them all at the same time. Without profiles, any time I go to create a new tab/window it inherits the login characteristics I most recently logged in with. If I logged in most recently with my personal account, and open a new tab/window to go to GCP, it will try authenticate against that service as my personal account, not my work GCP google account. So, I need to log out of my personal google account, log in as my work GCP google account, and then do the thing. Later, when I want to do something with my personal google account and I need to do that process all over. Ugh.
With profiles, I can easily have an entire window be cleanly associated with that one google account. So, in my window for my personal google account I can open tab after tab and they will all be authenticated as my personal google account. I need to do something for my work GCP stuff? I have a different window that is using my work GCP profile that is logged in with my work GCP google account. Any tab I open in that window is similarly authenticated as that account.
It doesn't have to be google accounts, it can be any kind of authentication world, but you get the idea.
Up until recently I used Chrome for all my work stuff because it was just too much of a pain to be able to deal with all these different accounts I needed to be authenticated with. Now, I can leave Chrome at the door.
I do prefer the way Chrome handles profile colors. You can set a color for a profile in Chrome and the entire border of the windows with that profile take on that color so it's really easy for me three-finger swipe up and click over to my work GCP window because it's green ... or the google groups management profile window because it's red, or my personal one because it doesn't have a color, etc. You can associate colors with profiles in Safari right now, but the color is only really obvious when it's a blank tab ... once you've visited any site it doesn't make it nearly as easy as Chrome to identify 'from a distance' which window is which profile based on color.