Browser profiles for developers and QA on a Mac
by ZwayStudiosupdated
Developers and testers often need several accounts on the same sites at once: a personal and a work GitHub, two or three cloud consoles, and admin, customer and fresh-user accounts on staging. Separate browser profiles keep those sessions apart, and Chrome Profile Switcher gives each profile its own Dock icon so you can jump straight to the one you need. It supports Chrome-based browsers and Firefox.
Why profiles fit dev and QA work
A single browser session can hold only one login per site. Juggling accounts by signing in and out is slow and easy to get wrong, especially when the wrong account can deploy, delete or approve.
Profiles give each account a separate session with its own cookies, local storage, extensions and history. A few common splits:
- GitHub: one profile for your personal account, one for your work organisation.
- Cloud consoles: one profile per cloud account or per environment, so production is never a tab away from a test project.
- Staging and QA: one profile per role you test, such as admin, standard user and a new signup, so you can have all three on screen at once.
- Extensions: a clean profile with no extensions for reproducing bugs, and a tooling profile with your dev extensions.
The problem: one icon for everything
On a Mac, the Dock shows one icon per running app. Every profile lives inside the same browser, so all of those sessions pile up behind a single Chrome or Firefox icon. Finding “the admin window on staging” means cycling windows with ⌘` or opening the avatar menu, which opens a new window rather than the one you already had.
How per-profile Dock icons help
Chrome Profile Switcher adds a Dock icon for each profile with an open window, with the profile’s picture and a small browser badge.
- Click a profile’s icon to bring its existing windows forward, even on another desktop or display. Click again to cycle.
- Hover to see that profile’s windows and click one to jump to it. Live previews are optional and need Screen Recording; without it you see titles.
- Right-click for New Window or New Incognito Window in that profile, handy for a clean test.
There is no copy of the browser and no extension. One browser keeps running, and each profile icon is a launcher of about 2 MB in ~/Applications/Chrome Profiles.
How matching works, briefly
For Chrome, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Chromium and Yandex, the browser adds the profile name to the end of each window title when you have more than one profile. The app reads titles through the macOS Accessibility API and matches them against the profile list in the browser’s Local State file. Two profiles with the exact same name cannot be told apart, so give them unique names like “gh-work” and “staging-admin”.
For Firefox, Zen, LibreWolf and Waterfox, each profile runs as its own process, so a window belongs to its process’s profile. Profiles are read from profiles.ini. More on the Firefox page.
Firefox profiles too
Many developers keep Firefox Developer Edition next to Chrome. Firefox, Developer Edition and Nightly are all supported, and each Firefox profile gets its own Dock icon just like a Chrome profile. You can open about:profiles in Firefox to create and manage them.
Useful paths and commands
- Chrome profile folders live in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/ as Default, Profile 1, Profile 2 and so on. chrome://version shows the current Profile Path. See our guide to the Chrome profile folder location.
- You can launch a profile from Terminal with
open -na "Google Chrome" --args --profile-directory="Profile 1", though it always opens a new window. Our guide on opening a Chrome profile from Terminal goes further. - If you like focus to follow your pointer while working across editor, terminal and browser, look at Focus Window Under Pointer.
Limits
- Opera, Opera GX, Arc and Dia are matched only when they have one profile for now.
- There is no per-profile keyboard shortcut yet; it is listed as “Next” on the roadmap.
- The app needs macOS 14 or later. It is a free beta, not notarized yet, so the first open needs one Open Anyway click in System Settings, Privacy and Security.