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How to switch user profiles under Vivaldi on macOS

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.

To setup

  • 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”

To use

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”.

Notes

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.

@ryofurue
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Does anybody know how to handle auto-update when multiple instances (with separate profiles) of Vivaldi exists?

A while ago, an auto-update popup showed up. I closed all the instances of Vivaldi as a precaution. I then invoked just one instance and did "Vivaldi" > "Check for Updates" . But, then, I was told that the Vivaldi is already up to date.

Is it possible that one of the instances don't know that it's up to date?

@xMajedz
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xMajedz commented Apr 20, 2017

actually in vivaldi you can add profiles with vivaldi://settings/createProfile it well send to a chrome like setting page

@Zalext
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Zalext commented Jun 20, 2017

May I suppose that this will work for Opera also?
(Changing Vivaldi to Opera, off course.)

@imasaru
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imasaru commented Dec 11, 2017

vivaldi://settings/createProfile no longer seems to work in Vivaldi 1.14.1036.3.

Also, using the --user-data-dir argument instead of --profile-directory would allow each user profile to use its own settings and configurations, whereas the latter would share those with the original profile. This allows for a truly standalone experience when running multiple instances of Vivaldi.

To use this in Automator: open -n -a /Applications/Vivaldi.app --args --user-data-dir="$HOME/Library/Application Support/Vivaldi/"$1""

(Source: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/14607/weird-multiple-vivaldi-instances-and-saved-sessions/4)

@krystian3w
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"vivaldi://settings/createProfile" if no work use: chrome://settings.

@ruario
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ruario commented Feb 27, 2019

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