Since the beginning of time, developers always had the issue of migrating their workflow from work to home. Having a laptop has relieved this issue, but for many of us who use multiple computers, it remains a minor discrepancy in the steaming pile of problems. Working from home isn’t a burden we’d ever want to take, but our environment was always decentralized amongst different locations. One computer has one setup, the other has another. It was never perfect, but fortunately solutions lay on the horizon.
There has been much effort put towards decentralizing our workflow, making one place the exact same instance as the next. Google’s ChromeOS is a perfect, if simple, example a centralized computing experience. You log off one computer, and log on another and your “session” is intact. This is because your session is stored within the cloud. It requires an active internet connection to use this feature, but for a majority of the situations that you use a cloud-based operating system for, it works.
Google’s ChromeOS is an operating system based on Google’s Chrome browser, and it fits nicely with Google’s ideology: to keep your information in one place. Google Chrome itself, has a smaller, much more adaptive instance of this idea and it’s embedded into Google’s Sync feature inside Google Chrome.
Google Chrome’s Sign In feature allows you to log in with your Google Account and sync your preferences, bookmarks, extensions, and even history within your browser amongst other computers that have signed in to your Google Account. This data is encrypted, and can be salted with your own unique password (it’s optional, but highly recommended if you’re scared of data thieves). This is a nice feature, but nothing new to the table with Firefox’s Sync and Opera’s Link features. Still, it’s a useful feature and is one of the first things I do when I set up my computer.
Switching between profiles is a two-click process.
What is new and exciting to Google Chrome is the Profiles feature. This feature allows you to quickly switch between one “browser profile” to the next, and in a nutshell it builds on top of the Google Chrome Sign In feature. A profile (can be) a Google Account that has been signed into your computer. Each profile is, essentially, it’s own instance of Google Chrome. Everything is separate between each profile: bookmarks, themes, extensions, preferences, history, passwords, and so on. You can also sign in to a different Google Account on each profile, so if you have Gmail and your work has Google Apps, you’re just a two-step process away from separating work with play.
Cool, but how does this improve my workflow? I need an example.
Before this update, I was forced into a merged home/work browser-hell involving Facebook and Reddit bookmarks next to Harvest and Basecamp. While it’s cool to have all of your links up there and ready to go, for people like me, this is a gigantic distraction. Typically, while at work, I tend to open Reddit while a page refresh takes forever. It’s up to you to judge, but in my opinion, it breaks my train of thought.
Basically, it can keep you from working when you don’t need to. Keep your NFL and Facebook extensions on the play-side, and keep your Web Developer and Firebug extensions on the work-side.
Just a tip, thought I’d share. I find it to be an incredibly useful feature for keeping myself focused as the Internet can get extremely distracting.
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TL;DR: Google Chrome’s Sign In feature provides a simple and reliable way to keep your data in one spot amongst multiple computers by using your Google Account. Google Chrome’s multi-user Profiles feature allows you to keep multiple Google Accounts synced and provides a quick and simple way to switch between them, thus alleviating workflow constraints caused by only having one single account for multiple workflows.
More info about Google’s Sign In feature here.
More info about Google’s Profile feature here.