Establishing Contextual Identities in Chromium

[Nicholas DiPiazza]

Dear group,

I am interested in customizing my Chromium build to have something like Mozilla Firefox's Contextual Identifies where I want to be able to, for each browser tab, select from a contextual identity so that each browser tab isolates to a completely separate profile with cookies, indexed db, and storage.

Has anyone created contextual identities in Chromium yet? 

There are a few browser extensions that sort-of do it, but it's more of a hack. I'm interested in hearing anyone's story that has tried to accomplish something similar and seeking their advise on how to proceed.

Thanks!

[Greg Thompson]

The closest thing in Chromium is profiles. Each has its own top-level window, so you can't have tabs from multiple "identities" in the same browser window.

If you choose Chromium over Firefox, it might be easier for you to adjust to profiles as they are now (they do much of what you want).

--
--
Chromium Developers mailing list: chromi...@chromium.org
View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe:
http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-dev
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Chromium-dev" group.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-dev/99acb6af-7a03-48bb-91e6-3cf8bc909ab6%40chromium.org.

[Nicholas DiPiazza]

Hey Greg. Thanks for the reply.

Yeah profiles seem like the right way to go. obviously a profile encapsulate the "user". i wonder how difficult it is going to be to make it so each tab can be assigned a different profile though. 

I did know you can have multiple chrome profiles open at the same time if you use the command line to tell it what profile to use. 

But can you actually do this without the command line currently? Is the "profile" button

The key to doing this? 

What are some key classes involved? 

[Peter Kasting]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 7:50 AM Nicholas DiPiazza <nicholas...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yeah profiles seem like the right way to go. obviously a profile encapsulate the "user". i wonder how difficult it is going to be to make it so each tab can be assigned a different profile though. 

Extraordinarily difficult.  I would expect person-years of effort for this, as the link between profile and window is deeply ingrained throughout the code.

There are also complicated UX questions here, such as what you'd do if two tabs in the same window had profiles with different custom themes loaded (each of which themes the whole window) -- the obvious but misleading choice is to let the active tab dictate the window theme.

I did know you can have multiple chrome profiles open at the same time if you use the command line to tell it what profile to use. 

But can you actually do this without the command line currently? Is the "profile" button

The key to doing this?

Yes.

It's not clear to what degree you've tried to use Chrome's existing multiprofile features.  If it hasn't been much, you might want to play around with it for a while just to see what it can do.

PK