How do I start Chrome using a specified “user profile”?

Question

I use the new built-in "Users" feature of Chrome to switch between Home/Work accounts easily. However, Chrome remembers the "last" user profile you had selected when launching new windows. This is a problem if I close down my "Home" profile last, because when I then click the Email shortcut on my taskbar, because it goes to mail.mycompany.com using my Home profile, and I'm not logged in.

I'd like to change the shortcut to the company webmail to pass a switch that tells Chrome to always start as the "Default" user, regardless of the last one used.

Note: I have tried user-data-dir, and this seems to do something very different, completely isolated from the Users functionality built in to Chrome. It's possible I'm using it wrong, but please test this before assuming it does the same thing and posting an answer ;-)

Answer 1

The command line argument you're looking for is --profile-directory=Default.

Here's the complete command line for Mac OS X:

open -a "Google Chrome" --args --profile-directory=Default

It expects the internal names of the profiles: My second profile, named "Lemonade" by Chrome, would be --profile-directory="Profile 1".

On Mac OS X, the directories are located in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome.

Answer 2

--profile-directory is useless if you have already another profile opened or the last window you close is attributed to another profile.

I have app shortcuts with one profile. The apps shortcuts have --profile-directory="Profile 3" plus the --app="..

The default profile shortcut has --profile-directory="Default".

Both profiles get messed up. Extensions and the default shortcut that I use for daily browsing.