How To Create & Use Profiles In Google Chrome On Linux

For a while now Firefox has been my default browser of choice in part because of familiarity, in part because of the addons and in part because of the ability to have profiles, not to mention the ability to redirect those profiles inside an encrypted volume. Chrome has caught up with most of the rest, except the profiles, until I found out how.

Firefox stores it's settings and profile information in .mozilla inside your home folder. Chrome and Chromium store it's profiles in .config/google-chrome and .config/chromium respectively. I've struggled to redirect anything inside .config without redirecting the whole lot which isn't suitable. My Openbox stuff is in there and needs to be available on login.

It turns out that you can put your Chrome or Chromium profile folders wherever you like and call them whatever you like. For this example we'll create a .chrome folder inside your home folder, and create two profiles inside it, by creating two folders called Home and Work.

Next is how to actually launch into those profiles. It'll be easier to create a launcher or menu ietm to do this, as you're not launching Chrome with the default command, you're adding flags and parameters to it. Create the launcher as usual and modify it's properties so it executes:

google-chrome --user-data-dir=~/.chrome/Work

google-chrome --user-data-dir=~/.chrome/Home

Choose a name for the launcher to show, like Work or Home and that's it. Simple huh? Now when you double click to launch that profile, it will blast the first run settings into that folder and act independantly of any other profiles. Apparently there are third party profile managers for Chrome, but this is universal and should work fine in Chromium with chromium-browser instead of google-chrome in the command. You can now redirect that into an encrypted volume if you like, or create those profile folders directly inside an encrypted volume.

The ~ is a *nix shorthand for "/home/yourusername/" if you prefer you can set that as an absolute value pointing to the same place, it will do the same job. If you copy and paste this across various user account names you will have to remember to change the yourusername part to suit.

google-chrome --user-data-dir=/home/yourusername/.chrome/Work

Now you can delete the .config/google-chrome folder as it's no longer required.

Arguably the hardest part of browser profiles is in figuring out how to split the use that you previously had bundled into one profile and then sticking to it. Home and Work is an onbious example. One for each family member is another, which is handy if you all use the same user login session for the OS. It means you can have different addons, different bookmarks, different history, different pinned applications etc. I have one for regular surfing, one for web design and another for social stuff.

If you want, you could also have the profile folder(s) stored on a shared folder like Dropbox or a NAS so that it always points to the same folder no matter what computer you're using. I'd have privacy issues with the Dropbox option myself but you can encrypt a volume inside Dropbox which solves that issue. I've mentioned encrypted volumes a few times in this post. I am planning a screencast on this, it will hopefully be released soon.

If you run Chrome from the default menu it will run simply as google-chrome which looks for the profile in .config/google-chrome. If it doesn't exist, it will create it and act like a first run. I haven't tried this yet, but my hunch is that if your profiles are in an unmounted encrypted volume, and you try to run it, it will default back to the .config/google-chrome option. This allows you to have a guest mode without the users being able to access your profile, even if it is on their menu.