Chrome and Firefox supports using multiple profiles that won't affect each other, reusable (unlike incognito) and can even have entirely different extension ecosystem.
By creating and using multiple profiles, you can do development — creating extensions, modifying the browser, or testing the browser — while still being able to use Google Chrome as your default browser.
How to do it:
From Chromium docs:
The details of how to create and use a profile vary by platform, but here's the basic process:
- Create a folder to hold data for the new profile.
- Create a shortcut or alias that launches the browser, using the --user-data-dir command-line argument to specify the profile's location.
- Whenever you launch the browser, use the shortcut or alias that's associated with the profile. If the profile folder is empty, the browser creates initial data for it.
In other words, simply create an empty directory somewhere and run this to open a new instance of chrome that's completely separate from any current one:
open -n -a "Google Chrome" --args --user-data-dir=$(mktemp -d)
Related:
- see here for how to open chrome on mac and pass it arguments
- see here for how to create a random temp directory in bash
