Running two independent instances of Chrome

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 e.g. http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/google_chrome_portable

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:

  1. "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --user-data-dir="c:\user1"
  2. "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --user-data-dir="c:\user2"
  3. ...
  4. https://medium.com/linked-helper/how-to-setup-separate-chrome-instance-for-windows-9ac9921b81b3