For anyone who maintains multiple accounts with the same website, they know the pain of logging out and in again on the browser to check the other one. It is particularly painful when you are synchronizing two accounts to have similar settings, and you are constantly going in and out of them. It turns out there are four (really three) solutions I know of.
- Use two different browsers. Most people have two browsers installed: Firefox and IE. Just open one account in one, the other account in the other. You’re done.
- Use IE tab in Firefox. Simplify Window clutter by installing IE tab and doing #1 again, but this time without ever leaving Firefox. Just click the little Firefox icon in the corner of a new tab and now you’re using IE, but within Firefox!
- Use Cookie Pie. This works pretty well by letting you set per-tab cookies, but there are a lot of conflicts with other addons (look at their blog page). Right now, I’m using it to log into two Dropbox accounts (by the way, Dropbox is amazing. I have referral codes that can get us both more space. Ping me in comments.) However, I have very irritating conflicts when using it on facebook, gmail, and Roundcube (webmail program).
- Use CookieSwap. This doesn’t let you set per-tab configuration, but you can switch back and forth, which is pretty similar. This focuses on multiple computer users rather than a single multitasking user as Cookie Pie does, I think.
All options right now have their limitations, but I think #2 is the most reliable.
August 21, 2009
I have happily been using #4 for a while. The nice thing is that I can come to the computer, swap into my cookie account, be immediately logged in, and then get done really quickly.
A new item on the list in Firefox 3.5 is now “Private Browsing” (or using an add-on like “Stealther” in FF 3.0)- it hides all the cookies on the computer and deletes everything you do when you’re done. This is perfect if you don’t want mind logging into everything each time you come to the computer.