I have four different Google accounts and quite often I find myself in a browser in the wrong account. For example I might be trying to edit my church calendar, which resides in my work Google account, but because I have just been reading my personal mail in Gmail, I am logged into that Google account. In the Chrome browser you can switch accounts by going to the top right and selecting a different account but it’s clunky.

This article below describes how to automatically login to a certain account when you open a URL in a browser. To automate this with a script see here.

There’ s a Firefox plug-in that allows you to automatically keep your different Google accounts in separate ‘containers.’ Whenever you go to a website it can remember how you were last logged into that website from that container. This allows you to be logged into multiple accounts from different tabs in your browser at once. The tabs are color coded according to which ‘container’ you are in.

Here’s how it works. Firstly install the Firefox plug-in called “multi-account containers”. Then you can set up separate containers.

Think of a container as a particular user that you would like to use the web as. So for me my containers are my four different Google accounts…

Now when I go to a website I can choose which container you want to visit the website from. Have a look at the screenshot below and you can see I am visiting my Google groups page from my dubbo.org container which means I will see all the groups from that Google account.

Now here’s where it gets really cool. You can choose to always open a URL in a certain container.

When I go to the Google groups page I can tell it to open it from the container that has a certain Google account logged in .

Once you’ve selected a default container for a website, the first time you open a website it will confirm that you do want to in fact open the website in that container this and in future times.

This is telling Firefox that whenever I go to the Google groups URL, in particular the dubbo.org group, do it from my dubbo.org container so that I am logged into the right account.

This is how you can be logged into multiple Google accounts once. You can also choose which Google accounts you want to open certain websites from. It’s a very neat solution.

Once you’ve set this up you might want to read this article as to how to automate this into an AppleScript so that you can just open a website from an account in a browser straight from the dock.