Use Multiple Browsers for Multiple Google Accounts



Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video I’ll tell you how I use 3 different browser for 3 gmail accounts and 3 different roles in my life. 
Do you have more than one gmail account?  Maybe one for personal stuff and one for work?  If so, does it drive you crazy when you try to switch back and forth between accounts?  You think you’ve switched, but somehow it keeps going back to a different account?  Or you try to open calendar, but it opens the wrong calendar and you can’t get it to stick on the right one?  It’s a universal frustration.  And somehow, the accounts belonging to Gmail Suite are even more frustrating than the regular accounts!  Okay — first I'll tell you about my overall solution, and then I'll give a couple of additional tips for handling this problem.  My main solution is to use
Multiple Browsers
Hands-down my favorite browser is Google Chrome, but I also have a couple of other browsers installed on my computer. I used to have them on there only for troubleshooting purposes, but now I use several of them regularly.  It started with a part-time job that I have that uses Google Suite.  My personal Gmail account was always the default account, and it became increasingly frustrating and time consuming to switch between accounts to do my work. I finally just started using Mozilla as my work browser.  That way, when I launch Mozilla, it always has my work account listed as default. And I NEVER log in with any of my other accounts, so Mozilla is never confused. As a result, I never have to toggle between accounts. The bonus is that I can also set the start pages to the ones I use the most frequently for my work tasks.  So, at the point I had Mozilla as my work browser and Google Chrome for everything else.  
So, that worked out for a while, but now I have FIVE gmail accounts: personal, part time job, this YouTube channel, Grad School, and my internship. Fully three of those are Google Suite accounts, which as I said before can have really annoying behavior.  I don’t mind toggling between my YouTube channel account and personal — I don’t have to do that very often.  But once I started my internship, the constant toggling became time consuming and annoying. So, now I use the Opera browser for both my internship and for grad school.  I frequently have to access both of these accounts in a single session, so it makes sense to use them in the same browser. 
You may think it is weird that I don’t use Microsoft Edge since it comes installed on most PCs. I LOATHE it for many reasons: I find it cumbersome, slow, and manipulative, but the main dealbreaker for me was the way it was interacting with the touch pad on my computer.  Instead of scrolling, it was dragging and dropping stuff and making me lose a ton of data particularly in Google Sheets.  But that is okay — there are other really great browsers out there and all of them are free!
Okay — say you are still using a couple of accounts with one browser, like I do with my personal and Marble Jar Accounts. I have a couple of tips for dealing with this without losing your mind. 
Tip #1 - Use the Google Menu
Say you are in Gmail and you want to switch to Google Calendar.  If you just open a new tab and then open calendar, it will ALWAYS open the calendar with your default account — many times this means switching out of the account you really want to be in. You can tell which is the default account by clicking on your photo in the upper right hand corner and looking for the word “default” by the account.  If none of the accounts have “default” by them, then you are currently in the default account. 
So if you are in Gmail for a non-default account, and want to switch to the same non-default account Google calendar, i would suggest using the Google menu. The Google menu is up here and looks like bingo card. You can get to most Google services from this menu. When you click on any of these it will retain the same account that you are currently in but open that Google service in a new tab. So, if you want to remain in the same account, use this menu to navigate to the next service.
Tip #2 - Close Browsers or Log Out
Sometimes you get some really strange behavior happening, particularly in Google Suite accounts.  You’ll be denied access, won’t be able to get to certain services, or just get a weird error message. If this happens, close all your browsers and try again. If the same thing happens, log out first,  close all your browsers, and try again. In order to log out, click on your profile and click sign out here at the bottom. Now the first account that you sign into will automatically become the “default” account. And that’s it — my overall solutions and a couple of tips for using multiple google accounts. 
Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!

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