Enable Profile Picker in Google Chrome

How to Enable Profile Picker in Google Chrome

Google is working on a new experimental Chrome feature that allows opening a dialog with a list of available user profiles every time you open the browser. This can be useful if you have more than one profile, and want to differentiate your activities.

Having multiple profiles in the browser is really useful. They allow you to differentiate profiles for banking, private stuff, and general browsing. By default, Chrome will load the last used profile. The profile picker feature allows you to quickly select the desired profile without opening the default one.

Actually, most Chromium-based browsers allow specifying the profile to use, but it involves command line arguments. Here's a quick example for Chrome and Chromium:

chrome.exe --profile-directory="Default"

If you have this as a shortcut target for your Chrome browser, it will always loaded with the 'Default' profile. This way, you can create shortcuts for all your Chrome profiles. Also, when you create a new profile, Chrome offers you to automatically create a desktop shortcut for it.

Profile Picker is a convenient alternative to these methods. When it is enabled, the browser shows the following dialog, allowing you to choose with which profile to continue.

As of this writing, this feature is only available in the Canary build of Chrome. You have to install it to give the Profile Picker a try.

To Enable Profile Picker in Google Chrome

1. Open the Google Chrome browser.
2. Type the following text in the address bar: chrome://flags/#enable-new-profile-picker.
3. Select Enabled from the drop down list next to the New profile picker option.
4. Restart the browser when prompted.

Voila, you should now see the new dialog.

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