The worst part of multiple google accounts is a bug (feature?) in the account switcher widget. The flow is a two page thing where you first pick the account you want to switch to and then enter your password on the next page. For some reason they decided to add a feature where if you type the wrong password into the second page, they check it against the rest of your accounts, and switch you to any one that matches.

Even more annoying, the form has no username field (since you already picked it on the first page), which causes my password manager to pick the most recently used one and log me back in as the account I was trying to switch away from!

Chrome has a concept of multiple users in it's preferences. When you turn it on then you can pick an icon per account and it shows up on the top right of the browser window. To switch to a different user click on that and switch to a different user. Each user can sign into a different google account.

Each user has it's own cookies, chrome extensions etc. Keeps work and personal accounts very separate.

I started using this a few months ago. It definitely helps a lot, but it can still break the workflow.

Using OSX, when I click on a link inside Mail, it opens it in Chrome using the last used user. It's annoying when it's the wrong user. You still need to switch users and reopen the link in Chrome.

This is why I use different browsers for different accounts (Chrome, Safari and Firefox are generally all fine for regular web use) and Choosy (http://www.choosyosx.com/) to prompt me which browser to open the link in.

It also allows for binding certain URLs to specific browsers.

I have the same problem, as I have a personal and a work Google account. Chrome can sometimes ask you if you want to switch accounts, but in the end, I use Firefox for personal stuff and Chrome for my work.

BrowserChooser http://browserchooser.codeplex.com/ is a nice tool (like Choosyosx) to help select what URL to open in which browser.

To sync to Google Drive, I use Syncdocs http://syncdocs.com which is an enhanced Google Drive sync app that enables syncing multiple accounts at the same time.

I think Google wants each user to only have one account, which makes it better for them tracking ads.

How has your experience been with Syncdocs?

I'd recently looked into ways to cure the pain of multiple google drive accounts running on the desktop app. People spoke highly of CloudFuze and InSync, but their support forums were filled with really awful error reports about random file deletions or endless file replication.

These services sound like a syncing layer on top of a syncing layer, which seems prone to errors.

You could use chrome for all of them and specify the profile in the command line arguments

I have used this now for years.

It's a fucking godsend, every computer I have has 3 different Chrome accounts on it, all short cuts on my tool bar.

On windows at least it is trivial, extremely trivial, to switch between them. You will generally be in one of the modes, for me these are "their company", "my company", "personal".

Whichever one you used last will be the one that receives the "open internet" command. So if you are in "their work" mode, reading your emails in their email client it will open the google doc in the right context.

For you your workflow is somehow broken, for me that's exactly what I want. If I'm in "their work" mode, I want all browsers to open in that context. I'm not expecting them to be psychic. That means 95% of the time it just works because you are already in the right context. The other 5% you get used to very quickly. If I open up my personal email account, I want any next links clicked to be opened in that context.

Added bonus, it's great for every SASS not just just google accounts.

Would be cool if it could detect which users had access to the document and switch to the most recently used of those to open the link. Not sure if that can be done securely though.

Firefox has an even more powerful version of this.

If you start firefox with the "-P" flag you can choose to create a new profile. You can also pass it an argument (e.g. firefox -P default) to choose one.

In this case, the profiles are completely disparate; there is zero overlap. In this case, you simply have to login to one google account per window and paste into the correct window (still not ideal).

To run multiple profiles at once, launch all profiles after the first one with "firefox --no-remote -P <profile-name>". Clicking links will open them with the firefox that was launched without "--no-remote".

How is it more powerful? This is exactly the same thing, but apparently with a worse UI (the multiple profile thing in Chrome is exposed through the UI).

The firefox instances have completely different processes, settings, etc. Everything. Chrome, unless I'm mistaken, does not go that far.

For example, one of my main uses of multiple-profiles is that I have a different profile for every proxy I use. I can launch a firefox profile that's proxied side-by-side with my usual firefox (aside, the firefox proxy settings are exposed via the UI, unlike chrome).

Chrome, I'd have to run "google-chrome-stable --proxy-server=$proxy" and then, again unless I'm mistaken, all accounts will use that proxy server. That, by itself, is a deal breaker.

I'm not familiar enough with chrome's settings and so on to say what does and doesn't leak; I could be completely wrong on all of this, but I suspect I'm correct.

Edit: On looking more, Chrome's does look more complete than I thought. The proxy bit still is a dealbreaker for me (well, and I'm adverse to logging into a google account), but I retract much of what I said.

Have you tried FoxyProxy Firefox extension?

I haven't used it in a long time, but I did use it at one point.

It's just not as good security and privacy-wise. Using proxies on/off on one profile, as it encourages, results in any tracking cookies seeing both IPs having the same tracking data, and thus your proxy has lost some of its privacy.

I also run entirely different extensions when I'm going for privacy vs fun browsing vs banking etc etc.

If you just want proxies to get around some region restriction and don't really care about the privacy or security aspects, then FoxyProxy might be fine.

For people afraid of the CLI, there are some nice addons to manage multiple profiles directly from the interface. A very nice one is "Profilist" (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profilist/)

I wrote a Firefox extension on 2007 that allowed you to use different accounts at the same time in different tabs (no windows!). The video showing it continues to be available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EBkB-Yp-zM

Sadly it was very difficult to maintain.

> "Keeps work and personal accounts very separate."

Does it? I don't know either way, but if I were google I would link the two accounts (just takes one more cookie at most!) so that if me@work-acct searches for a car, then me@home-acct can be served a car ad....

Yeah, chrome profiles is the answer. I typically have two chrome windows open, one with my work account and one for personal. Each is linked to the corresponding Google account. This gives the advantage of chrome sync (bookmark sync, etc.)

That said, the OP had 4 google accounts, so I can see how this could get messy.

The last (and only) time I used this it ended up adding all my development-focused extensions to my SO's Chrome profile, then when she removed them made a mess of my Chrome configuration on other systems, so YMMV.

Here's some more info about Chrome profiles for whoever is interested (http://www.googlegooru.com/how-to-create-google-chrome-profi...). Like most others have said, I have three Chrome profiles on every computer that I use. It's perfect for maintaining your workflow across multiple devices, as you can open up the same tabs at home that you had open at work.

It is also great for web development. Have one user profile that has all the password managers, adblocks, etc not installed.

I've had this issue constantly, as I have three separate accounts (work, personal gmail, and non-gmail google account). Lately, I had one of the worst situations though.

Coworker sent me an invitation to join a calendar. I click the link, it takes me to my personal gmail calendar page and pops up a dialog saying 'You don't have access to this!'.

I close the dialog, then click on the account change thing to switch over to my main account, and close the old tab. Click the link again. Opens my personal calendar again. I had to log out of everything then log into this account (all of this manually) before I could view the calendar.

Thankfully I didn't care enough and ignored the calendar invite.

Emailed Google calendar invite is an even bigger bag of pain. They include two ".ics" attachments (one called "Mail Attachment.ics" and one called "invite.ics", leaving you wonder which one to use). If you try clicking the "Yes" in the email invite and you are not logged into the correct Google+ identity you get an HTML splash that says "Google Calendar invitations cannot be forwarded via email" (and no links to break out of that. If you load the ICS into iCal you can accept the meeting (and the sender seems to see that, so there must actually be no useful account based security in play). I thought about filming that one- but I don't want to go through those steps again.

I think it is fair to evaluate Google tools in a mixed environment. To assume a pure-Google environment is to assume away all other options and choices.

Do Google employees actually use any of this stuff? The workflows are terrible, I can't imagine they aren't bothered by these same problems.

you're talking about a google team that tested chrome on over 5,000 of its employees and not one of them bothered to open hotmail (the most popular email at the time). This was when chrome first premiered, and many popular websites didnt work in chrome.

I'm sure they use it plenty, just all in the same exact way. i have this problem because i have my personal and 2 work accounts that are customer specific.

They seem to eat only their own dog food.

true. they also brain wash most of their workforce to a dedication to the company you haven't seen since japan in the 70s... so my guess is that all google employees only ever have their work @google.com gmail account. ever.

When I worked at Google (2010), this was a major pain point. Your @google.com account is essentially a Google apps account and most people have a personal @gmail.com account. At the time, the best solution was to use multiple browsers or incognito mode.

The flows can definitely be improved and I'd attribute this to it being a hard implementation problem rather than a lack of awareness around what a good flow looks like. Most companies don't even try to support letting you log into multiple accounts at one time. Having multiple domains (google.com, youtube.com, Google Apps domains) makes it even more complex.

I had the same issues with Google Docs, but now I always share documents as "public if you have the link," and send out a link. I have yet to regret trusting people to keep documents as private as I request.

I also just email people URLs to hangouts, instead of going through any Google UI. That also works without fail.

> I have yet to regret trusting people to keep documents as private as I request.

Keeping shared content private is always to a large extend a matter of social trust. No technological solution can fully enforce permissions that you have chosen. Even if you require Google login and explicitly specify a group of people that can access a document, an allowed person can still copy-paste the content and share it with a larger group, or simply tell others about the content.

IME it's less about the content leaking and more about an anonymous party making weird edits to the document and you not noticing

As a Linux user I breathe a sigh of relief when I get a Docs link rather than a complicated pptx file that won't render properly and I can't edit.

If you're running Linux as a matter of technical preference and not as a philosophical opposition to commercial software, I've had really good luck with just installing Office in Crossover.

Can't Libre office deal with pptx by now?

It always could 'deal with it', the issue is getting it to render identically to PowerPoint, which is virtually impossible to accomplish for non-trivial presentations, it seems. Likewise for other Office files. iWork has the same problem.

But surely Google docs presentations are fairly non-repeatable across browsers, operating systems, and years.

All "modern" browsers render Docs well. Not sure what difference the OS makes, after all, it's just a vessel for the browser's rendering engine.

Font rendering can differ between different OSes but it's usually not too bad.

Both are nice proprietary formats.

Google account switching is an insane nightmare. Sometimes I log out from account A, log in to account B, go to some Google service only to magically find myself to be in account A again.

Not only that, there is simply no way to go where I need to go as B, so I just have to use a different browser to make that happen.

And don't even get me started with Google's cross-account and cross-service messing with language and locale settings. I can to a certain extend understand Google's "the user is an idiot, so we'll make his choices for him" approach, but to constantly override explicit choices and settings is ridiculous.

That's one of the reasons I use Firefox for my personal account(s) and chrome for work. Almost never have to deal with this issue. Periodically, I do need to switch on the personal side (I have 4-5 different google accounts), but i have lastpass remember it all in the browser which makes it pretty painless.

Yep, or have another profile setup in Chrome that makes this super handy.

Many people seem to think you choose a browser, and once you have chosen a browser, you can no longer use other browsers.

The author of the article seems to be one of these people.

He could just have a different browser he uses for whatever his current top client is. Yes he would have to log in and out for different clients, but at least this would reduce the annoyance a lot compared to doing it all in one browser.

You can choose your browser. Except in some cases where your employer chooses your browser instead of you. And about half of the problems in the video had nothing to do with the browser (like not being able to switch accounts on Google's own "switch accounts" page without logging out first).

using multiple browser is breaking the user experience. you should be able to click a link and do whatever you have to do without worrying. Google should just make the links better, ie include a hash of the identity to use, so the user doesn't have to guess.

have you applied to google? you'd fit in with their UI team :D

Maybe I'm missing something, but why do so many of you have 2+ Google accounts that you use regularly. Maybe business vs personal? If so, why mix them on the same computer user account?

You read your personal email at work, or you collaborate with other people, or you are freelance. I have 3 google accounts, mostly use 2 and its annoying.

Also if you use chrome and use the same login it is hard to separate them.

I have my "main" Google account from forever ago. That's a gmail address I don't use, my Google calendar, Youtube, Google+.

I use Google apps on my vanity domain, and that's the email address I actually do use (@grahammitchell.com). So there's two.

My work recently switched over to Google apps, so to access certain content at work I have to be logged in to that one, too.

Finally, I have a separate Google account that holds my Chrome settings/bookmarks. I didn't intend to create this one, but somehow I did. It had originally been my vanity domain Google account but they discontinued support for that and prompted me to create a new one. In retrospect I should have just switched my Chrome account over to my "primary" Google account but it wasn't obvious at the time that I could have done this.

It's a mess. It really is.

I have the same problem. Every time I go to Google Docs it keeps making me choose a user, then I choose a user, then it doesn't let me in and makes me choose again. It does this even for the root subdomain. I end up having to open any Google Docs URL with a different browser where I only ever login with one account. One of the several accounts it always tries to use isn't even active any more, it's an expired Google Apps account from back when they started charging and it still always offers it even if I'm signed out.

Now that Google is so entrenched both in personal and corporate life, they really need to step up to handle ALL of the corner cases.

The Google assumption seems to be that you have one Google account, which is your singular identity. The reality for many people is that they have multiple Google accounts, none of which is their singular identity. The multi-account support they've added only serves to inadvertently spread your data across multiple accounts, rather than make it easier to work with them.

As an example, I ended up on YouTube the other day and, for some reason, was logged into my work Google account; curious, I clicked on 'Favorites' and found that some videos that I'd favourited once (and later been unable to find) were favourited there. Frustrating. There was also a moderate browsing history of videos, some of which I had likewise been looking for in the past.

Honestly, if it weren't for YouTube favourites I probably wouldn't log into any Google websites at all.

I asked Sundar Pichai about this at D10 in May, 2012 (see http://allthingsd.com/20120702/googles-wojcicki-and-pichai-o... @ ~35:40) and he said within 3 months they'd improve it... Still waiting. :(

I use different browsers for each google account. It's a real pain in my ass.

You can easily use a firefox profile per account rather than a browser per account and end up in roughly the same boat.

Just start firefox with "firefox -P" to create a new profile, and run "firefox --no-remote -P" on a new instance of firefox and choose that profile to run it side-by-side with your first, but with no data overlapping.

I always open the link in an incognito window and login with the email it was shared with. Have to re-login, but works without fail. And I don't have to logout of other accounts.

Also great for reading nytimes.com.

Chrome Profiles are a superior solution to having different tabs logged into different accounts, because it is very easy to make a mistake compared to profiles with different themes.

Same with Google+. I always get Hangout invites to the wrong Google account, and then we spend 10 minutes trying to get the call started and eventually switch to Skype.

Gmail login screen makes Google's position on your situation pretty clear.

At the top it says "One account. All of Google."

At the bottom it says "One Google Account for everything Google".

I've just had great fun trying to test in app purchases on an android app with multiple Google accounts. They don't make these things terribly simple.

great. now matt will see this post, demand changes, and they will screw up even more. anyone who ever had a personal and a google for domain accounts two or more years ago know what im talking about. they forced everyone to unify and killed one... it was hell with all my domains.

You could also just request access for the Google account you're using.

"Hey guys, Felix from Microsoft here."

Maybe you should have disclosed that you work for MS in your comment?

Didn't mean to annoy anyone, I'm nowhere near the office team. The downvotes speak for themselves though, so I guess apologies are in order.

Microsoft has been caught astro-turfing on HN before, you really don't want to be lumped in with that lot so if you can resist the temptation to plug microsoft products in threads about competitors it would be a benefit to everybody (even to Microsoft).

I think I'd rather just use etherpad+LaTeX.

Google's ecosystem needs work, true. But I don't think I'd ever willingly get back into bed with Microsoft.

Happy to check out Office if you can assure me that you won't resell my data or give it to the NSA, as claimed by X-Keyscore :)