Support of isolated sessions

[Stephen Cheng]

I'd like to be able to sign into multiple accounts at the same time (say, facebook account) within one chrome profile. I know incognito window can help create an isolated session from the regular session. However, if I create multiple incognito windows, they are tied together as a single shared session. Therefore, I can't sign into more than two accounts at the same time. I can only sign into one account in the regular session and another account in the incognito session.

I guess what I asking for is similar to the "New Session" in IE. Is that supported at all in chrome?

[Dominic Mazzoni]

Have you tried the multiple users feature? https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en

On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 8:24 PM, Stephen Cheng <sfc...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'd like to be able to sign into multiple accounts at the same time (say, facebook account) within one chrome profile. I know incognito window can help create an isolated session from the regular session. However, if I create multiple incognito windows, they are tied together as a single shared session. Therefore, I can't sign into more than two accounts at the same time. I can only sign into one account in the regular session and another account in the incognito session.

I guess what I asking for is similar to the "New Session" in IE. Is that supported at all in chrome?

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[Shanfeng Cheng]

I am aware of that. But I would like to do that within one user profile.

 

In firefox, each private window is completely isolated from other private windows. IE supports separate sessions on top of private browsing. Chrome is the only one that doesn't have good support of separate sessions.

 

We should be able to improve this scenario by make different incognito windows isolated from each other. Will it be very difficult to do technically?

 

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Shanfeng Cheng

[Shanfeng Cheng]

In follow up to this issue, I found that in ProfileImpl::GetOffTheRecordProfile( ), it only creates a single incognito session per regular profile no matter how many incognito windows the user chooses to open.

 

I have done experimental changes to this function, which allows the creating a separate incognito profile per incognito window. After the experimental change, I am able to log into different accounts with the same website at the same time in different incognito windows. It looks like at least the cookies are successfully isolated. The Incognito-session-only preferences are still shared (are these preferences used by the extensions?) but I am not sure how critical that is.

 

I think it might be nice to support multiple incognito sessions in chrome and it doesn't seem like a daunting task to support it. It's just a personal suggestion and it's a feature needed only by a small percentage of users.

 

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Stephen Cheng

 

From: Dominic Mazzoni

Date: 2013-11-06 23:35

To: Shanfeng Cheng

CC: chromium-dev

Subject: Re: [chromium-dev] Support of isolated sessions

[Stuart Morgan]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 12:08 PM, Shanfeng Cheng <sfc...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think it might be nice to support multiple incognito sessions in chrome and it doesn't seem like a daunting task to support it.

As far as I remember, the decision about incognito behavior was a UX decision (e.g., what happens if a site does window.open; how will users understand that some of their windows share cookies and others don't?), not a technical decision.

You're welcome to support it in your build, but it's not something that would be accepted into Chromium unless the intended behavior of the feature is revisited by UX.

-Stuart

[Shanfeng Cheng]

Thanking for sharing the information.

 

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Shanfeng Cheng