Chromium based browsers such as Vivaldi support the concept of user profiles. These are different user configurations, under a single operating system login. You could use different users profiles for home and work, or to allow a friend to use your browser without messing up your setup or interacting with your open tabs.
Vivaldi does not currently provide any user interface for switching user profiles outside of the command line switch —profile-directory=
(where you pass the name of the profile). However on macOS, you can make a quick launcher application in Automator.
- Open the
Automator.app
(part of macOS) and create a new “Application” - Drag “Ask for Text” (found under “Text”) into the actions area
- Set the “Question” to “Vivaldi Profile Name?”
- Set the “Default Answer” to “Default”
- Drag "Run Shell Script" (found under “Utilities”) into the actions area below “Ask for Text” and set "Pass input" to "as arguments"
- Replace the example code with the following:
open -a /Applications/Vivaldi.app --args --profile-directory="$1"
- Save the launcher application with an appropriate name in “/Applications”
You can just use the browser as normal, however if you need to switch user profiles, quit the browser and restart it via the launcher application, then enter the name of the profile you wish to use and press “OK”. You can choose any suitable name, just remember it so that you can enter it again in the future. The default profile (that you have been using thus far) is called simply “Default”.
If you are intending to use different versions of Vivaldi on the same machine then user profiles are not the answer. You should instead run one of them standalone. This ensures that newer settings do not get broken by running Vivaldi with an older build.
Thank you for posting this!
Is it possible to create an application for a specific profile, so that you don't have to type in the name every time?