Running two independent instances of Chrome
I use Chrome as my main browser. I also spend a lot of time on a particular webapp that my company uses. I'd like to keep those two things separate.
I can run the webapp in a separate window - but I'd like to go further than that. I'd like to have it be identified by a different task in the Win 7 taskbar; ideally a different icon; and ideally a different title in Process Monitor. How can I run a second, independent instance of Chrome, with a different title and icon, that won't merge with my main Chrome browser.
Settings->Add Person, choose icon, give it a name, make sure 'Create desktop shortcut for this user' is checked. Once you open this shortcut, it'll show up on your taskbar as a separate icon.
Read this for more details: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2089364/how-to-create-and-manage-multiple-user-profiles-in-chrome.html
I've done that before with a portable version of Chrome.
You could even use Google Chrome Canary (if you're ok with beta versions) as the 2nd one so that it has a different icon, etc.
Google Chrome builtin Profiles are a horrible way to have things separated because they have many bugs not fixed in a long time as (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=130656).
The best way to separate things is to create two or more different shortcuts to the Google Chrome Application with different data directories:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --user-data-dir="c:\user1""C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --user-data-dir="c:\user2"...- https://medium.com/linked-helper/how-to-setup-separate-chrome-instance-for-windows-9ac9921b81b3
Open your web app in a tab, then [Chrome > ⋮ > More tools... > Create shortcut].
This will open it in a Chrome popup window, which will separate it from the main instance, and provide it with the same favicon as provided by the web app domain. In Win7+ this can be pinned to the taskbar for convenience. Tested to work as of Chrome v72.0.3626.121.
You can run a separate instance of Chrome on Windows by creating a shortcut on your desktop with a different user-data directory.
1. Right click on the Chrome short on your desktop and click "Create shortcut"
2. Right click on the new shortcut "Google Chrome (2)" and click "Properties"
3. Look for the text box called Target, you'll see the path to the chrome executable
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"
4. Add --user-data-dir="c:\your_dir_name" to the end of the executable
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --user-data-dir="c:\chrome2"
Chrome will automatically create the new user-data directory when you use this shortcut.