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On Chrome I use several profiles to manage my personal and work life. There is one handy option to open a link to a page with a different profile. You just right click on the link and then select open as and then you selects the other profile. This is neat, but it useless when you already have the tab opened. What I want to do is open the current tab with a different profile. Is that possible with just chrome? Is there any extension that can be used for this purpose?
Thanks and regards
You can drag the 🔒 lock symbol from the left of the address bar, to drop the current page’s URL onto a different (profile’s) window’s tab bar or address bar (or bookmarks bar).
If the target window(’s tab bar) is not in view, you can Alt+Tab to the window while dragging, or drag (and not drop yet) onto its button in the task bar to bring the window to the foreground.
(If you are lost among many open windows, you can select a target profile, to bring its last focused window to the foreground, by clicking on the current profile’s pic in the top right area of the Chrome window.)
If you are not averse to using a different browser, Firefox has a nifty feature where you can have container tabs. Each container is isolated from the other.
You can have a maximum of 9 + 1 containers, but if you are separating only work and personal stuff you can configure 2 containers. And it's easy to open a link or any tab in a different container. Just right click the tab or link and select open in container > and select the appropriate container
I use container tabs on my work profile because I have to test multiple user logins and container tabs have made it so easy to have multiple sessions on the same browser window
Edit: almost forgot, you will need to install Mozilla's extension called multi account containers.
The only way I've found so far: For multiple tabs, although I agree it's not the fastest way. Only if you use it once/ occasionally:
Now you'll have all your tabs in the new profile. Although the autocomplete/passwords will not be saved this way...
You can pre-open other profiles and whenever you need to open a link in another profile just select and drag the link into other profile's new tab area.
If you don't care about speed, then the suggestion to "drag the 🔒 lock symbol from the left of the address bar onto a different (profile’s) window’s tab bar or address bar" is a good one.
If you're looking for a way to do this using the keyboard on a Mac, you can use an Applescript that is activated using a hotkey (e.g. BetterTouchTool).
-- copy current URL to clipboard
tell application "Google Chrome"
set the clipboard to URL of active tab of front window as text
end tell
-- delays necessary, especially when switching windows
delay 0.1
tell application "System Events"
-- make sure commands are being told to "Google Chrome"
tell (name of first application process whose frontmost is true)
-- switch to other profile (assuming only 2)
keystroke "m" using {command down, shift down}
delay 0.1
keystroke return
delay 0.2
-- open a new tab
keystroke "t" using {command down}
delay 0.2
-- paste the URL from the clipboard
keystroke "v" using {command down}
delay 0.1
keystroke return
end tell
end tell
Connect this Applescript to a keyboard command, and then use it whenever you want to copy the current page to another profile. Note: I'm assuming you only have 2 profiles. If you have more, then additional logic will be required to select the correct profile after pressing Command+Shift+M.
Edge has this functionality, as you can see from this screenshot:
My idea is also through bookmarks, but a little different and easier. Just copy and paste.
Save all bookmarks with Ctrl+Shift+D in a folder with a name of your choice
Then go to bookmark management and the desired folder Now select all desired bookmarks and copy them with Ctrl+C
Go to your other Chrome profile
Go to Manage Bookmarks
You can create a folder and paste the bookmarks there with Ctrl+V
Opening links except in Chrome tabs mode when it is a link on the same page: Right clicking and selecting another profile is possible when the links are on the same page.
Like the links we have from Google search, we can right-click on them and select the desired profile from open link to open it there, of course, it is individually, if we want to open these links in a group, we can use the plugin like Linkclump.
I was able to quickly accomplish this using the Session Buddy extension. You will need to use the Export/Import function to transfer between profiles. If you just use Save, you won't be able to see the saved session from the other profile.
Install the Session Buddy extension in both Chrome instances.
Open up SB in the profile instance that has the open tabs you want to transfer.
If you have a lot of tabs open and only want to transfer a few, save your current session (so you can restore it after the transfer) and then close all the tabs you don't want to transfer. You could transfer everything, but it can take a very long time to reload all those tabs if you have a gazillion.
Click on the Settings (Gear) icon to find the Export option. Save the URLs to a text file.
Go to SB in the new profile and click on Import under the Settings icon. Open the file you just saved and voila, there are your tabs opened in the new profile instance.
Restore your saved session in the original profile if you closed a bunch of tabs before exporting.
