Often find yourself with a ton of tabs open in Google chrome? Well there’s a much better way to get organized with your work, especially if you have multiple businesses or just want to differentiate your personal and work profiles.
Not many people are familiar, but Google chrome actually has a pretty neat feature that allows you to separate your Chrome profile into different tabs. Something like this:
This is roughly what it looks like on my desktop. When you click on each shortcut, it opens up Google Chrome but with separate bookmarks, saved tabs, chrome extensions and profile information. Pretty neat huh?
You can actually create multiple profiles and customize them based on your specific needs. Each Chrome profile is linked to a different email address which saves different information based on my browsing needs.
This is especially helpful to allow you to get organized instead of having to opening a gazillion tabs.
It’s a great way to get organized for multiple business lines or just separate work from your binge shopping needs!
The Benefits of Creating a Separate Chrome Profile
In short, better organization and productivity. When I open my business Chrome browser, it’s filled with my entire arsenal of bookmarks and extensions that sets me in the mood for work. And my personal profile is also fully loaded with bookmarks for all the latest “lobangs” and deal shopping sites.
Let’s be real, nobody can really multi-task on a ton of open tabs so it’s much better to keep things neat, focused and supercharge your productivity.
Add Different Bookmarks for Different Needs
Because I have different Chrome profiles, I can also save bookmarks that I need when working/browsing in each profile.
Here’s how I organize the bookmarks in different folders for my personal profile:
- Gmail – my bookmark is always to my gmail because that’s what I check the most
- Google Drive (or Dropbox if that’s your preferred cloud storage option)
- Shopping Folder – Shopee, Lazada, Shopback, Carousell, etc
- Social – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn
- Investments – Saxo, Tiger Brokers, Binance, Yahoo Finance,
- Finance – DBS ibanking (or your preferred banking provider), CPF, Medisave
- YouTube – save links to my favorite channels
- Read Later – here I add bookmarks for any websites or pages that I want to save for later
Of course you can customize your bookmarks based on your own needs since this is just my own personal layout.
And for my work profile my bookmarks are mostly separated by ad managers, website logins, and other business needs.
You can save different extensions
For my personal profile which I use for shopping and leisure browsing YouTube or Facebook, I actually fill it with various shopping Chrome extensions like Shopback (which gives rebates for purchases made online), adblocker (to ward off pesky “if you give me 5 minutes of your time…” ads) and LastPass which is an encrypted password manager so I don’t have to remember all my passwords.
My work Chrome profiles have much more business focused extensions that are specific to my business of running ads and creating websites. No adblocker here because it interferes with Facebook and Google ad manager.
I’ll show you exactly how to get everything set up in this guide.
Creating a New Chrome User Profile
It’s simple and only takes 5 minutes to set up a new profile. Here’s how.
- Step 1: Click on your profile avatar at the top right of Google Chrome
- Step 2: Click on “Add”
You’ll see something like this:
- Step 3: Choose if you want to “sign in” or “Continue without an account”.
- If you’re creating a new profile for your long-term use then you should consider signing in with a different email (e.g. work email for your work profile, personal email for personal profile)
- Step 4: Once you sign-in you’ll be prompted if you want to turn on sync. You should do this if you want to use the same profile across different devices so that your bookmarks, extensions and other info is synced (e.g. home desktop and laptop).
Once you click “Yes, I’m in” you’re pretty much set! Chrome will open another window with your selected user profile right now and you can start customizing it as you see fit.
Read the next section to learn how to add a desktop shortcut for this user.
Customize Profile Name, Background Colors and Avatar for Your Chrome Profile
- Step 1: Open your current Chrome browser and click on the three-dots at the top right-hand side, then click on “Settings” which will open in a new tab
- Step 2: Select “You and Google” on the left hand sidebar
- Step 3: Select “Customize your Chrome profile”
This will open up a view as seen below:
Here you then choose to rename your profile (i.e. Personal, Work, {business name}, etc).
You can also pick any theme color that you want to differentiate between different Chrome user browsers.
And lastly, you also choose your avatar image for the browser.
Create another desktop shortcut
If you scroll all the way down you can also check the option to enable a desktop shortcut for this new Chrome profile so that you can open it up easily any time you want.
Here’s how my set up looks.
If these tips have helped you or you have even better Chrome hacks to share, feel free to leave a comment below!