Profiles and private windows
A profile is a separate person behind one browser: its own cookies and sign-ins, its own history, its own bookmarks, its own extensions and its own tabs and groups. Switching profiles swaps all the tabs at once.
The profile button is on the right of the bar under the tabs, with its name and colour. A click opens the list:
- a click on a row switches to that profile;
- unfolding a row renames it, picks its colour, deletes it;
- dragging a row changes the order of the profiles: the others step aside to show where it will land. The private profile stands apart under a divider, always last, and does not drag;
- New Profile at the bottom;
- New Private Window, when there is no private profile yet.
Renaming a profile moves its folder on disk with it, so nothing saved under the old name is orphaned.
What a profile owns
| cookies, local storage, caches | an isolated WebKit data store |
| history | its own; ⌘Y shows the current profile’s |
| bookmarks | its own Profiles/<name>/Bookmarks/ folder |
| tabs and groups | its own |
| extensions | its own controller and storage |
| the agents’ working directory | Profiles/<name>/Scratchpad by default |
Blocking, certificates and filter lists are shared: they are what the browser trusts and blocks, not what the person sitting in it does.
Moving a tab to another profile
Right-click the page ▸ Move to Profile ▸ the profile’s name.
The tab goes to the other profile and the browser follows it there: otherwise
there would be nothing left to look at. It is the same tab and not a copy: the
same address, the same title, the same back and forward history. ⌘⇧T will not
offer it back, because nothing was closed. A tab outside every group lands at the
end of the bar, outside every group; a tab from a group lands beside the one open
in that profile.
The page does load again, though, and with somebody else’s cookies. That is the whole point: the same link, shown by a different person behind this browser.
| cookies and sign-ins | the profile it went to — usually another account, or a signed-out page |
| extensions | the new profile’s |
| history | the visit is recorded in the new profile from the moment it lands; what the old one already wrote stays |
| highlights | every profile has its own: the old ones go, the new profile’s appear |
| filled-in forms, unsent input | lost — the page loads from scratch |
A tab moves out of a private profile the same way — and from that moment the page is in the history of the profile it arrived in. That is exactly what asking for it in a profile that keeps history means.
The group the tab left asks nothing, even when that was its last tab: nothing was closed. The named empty group stays standing — its own menu deletes it.
A document cannot be moved into a private profile, and the item is disabled: the document’s text is a file on disk, rewritten a second after every keystroke, and a private profile is the one written down nowhere. The browser will not delete a person’s file to keep that promise.
Moving a group to another profile
Right-click the group’s title ▸ Move Group to Profile ▸ the profile’s name.
The group arrives whole — its name, its colour, folded or not, its pinned tabs and its side-by-side pairs — and stands after that profile’s other groups. Each of its tabs moves the way a single one does (above): the same tab, with the new profile’s cookies and extensions. Documents that cannot go into a private profile stay behind in the group where it was; when the group holds only those, the item is disabled.
A private window
⌘⇧P, or File ▸ New Private Window.
Private browsing here is a profile, not a mode: the first press creates a private profile, every one after it adds a window to it. The windows share one session, the way Safari’s private windows do.
What is not done:
- the site data store lives in memory and goes with the profile — cookies, local storage, IndexedDB, caches, service workers;
- no history is written;
- no bookmarks: the star and
⌘Dare disabled; - no highlights are stored;
- documents are not written to disk and live in memory;
- the profile is not in the session snapshot — after a relaunch it is gone;
- extensions do not run in a private window at all: private browsing is recorded nowhere, and an extension’s storage is a record.
File ▸ Close Private Browsing (or the profile chip’s context menu) closes the windows and forgets the profile. Quitting does the same.
Closing the last private tab — ⌘W, its close button, the middle button or a
menu — asks Close private browsing? Close Private Browsing erases the
session and goes back to the first saved profile; Keep Open closes just the
tab, and a start page opens in its place, as in any profile.
The one file a private profile can still touch is its agent scratchpad, if an agent is asked to work there.
History
⌘Y is the current profile’s history: search by title and address, ↑ ↓ walk
the rows, ↩ opens the selected visit in a new window, ⌘⌫ forgets it. The
History menu lists the last twenty pages separately.
History ▸ Clear <profile> History… asks what exactly to clear:
| Clear History Only | the list of visits |
| Clear History and Site Data | and the profile’s cookies, local storage and caches |
The second signs you out everywhere in that profile, and its open pages reload. The dialog says so.