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Accounts

Sessions are browsing profiles with logins of their own, so two shortcuts to one site can be two people. Private browsing keeps nothing.

Two shortcuts to the same site are normally the same person: one set of cookies, one login, whichever of them you click. An account breaks that. It is a browsing profile of its own, with its own logins and its own cookies, and any link that opens in GreatBar can use one.

So work Gmail and personal Gmail are two icons on the bar, signed in as two people, at the same time, with no signing out in between. The app calls them sessions in a few places and accounts in the rest; they are the same thing.

Making one

Two ways, and both end in the same place:

  • In a shortcut’s editor, the Session row has New Session… at the bottom. The link is put on the new account as soon as it is made.
  • In GreatBar’s window, the sidebar has the accounts under the bars, and New Session under them.

An account is a name and a mark, and nothing else: no password, and nothing GreatBar knows about who you are. You sign in the first time a link on that account opens, exactly as you would in a new browser profile.

The mark

Every account gets a coloured circle with its initial in it, chosen when the account is made and changed on the account’s own screen. It sits beside the address in the panel, and beside every shortcut signed in with that account in GreatBar’s window.

It exists because two pages on one site look identical, and which account they are is the one thing the page itself will not tell you.

The Session row in the editor, or Session in the icon’s right-click menu:

  • Default. The shared account every link uses when it says nothing. Perfectly fine for most of a bar.
  • One of your accounts, by name.
  • Private. No cookies, no history, nothing written to disk. Closing the panel ends it rather than leaving the page waiting with the logins still in it.

Accounts belong to the app, not to a bar, so a shortcut moved to another bar keeps the account it was using, and two shortcuts on two different bars can share one.

The account’s own screen

Select an account in the sidebar and it says what it is carrying:

  • Signed in with it: how many of your shortcuts open with this account, across every bar.
  • Sites that left something: how many sites have kept a login, a cookie or anything else in it. Asked of WebKit, so it arrives a moment after the screen does.

Under that, the mark, and the two things you can do:

  • Clear Data empties it: everything the sites left goes, which signs you out of the ones you were signed in to. The account itself stays, and so do the shortcuts that use it.
  • Delete Session removes the account entirely. Its logins and site data go with it, and every shortcut that used it goes back to the Default account. Both ask first.

What is kept, and where

Each account is a WebKit website data store of its own, kept apart from the others by an identifier, inside GreatBar’s sandbox container on this Mac. Nothing about it is sent anywhere: there is no GreatBar account and nowhere to send it. A private link is given a store that is never written to disk at all.

What a site keeps in an account is the site’s business, exactly as in a browser. What GreatBar keeps is the account’s name, its colour, and which shortcuts use it.

Private browsing, in detail

A link set to Private starts clean every time. It cannot restore where you were, since nothing was written down, and it is left out of the small things the app remembers for a run: a certificate you chose to go past, a password you typed for a site. Closing its panel ends the page.

It is the right setting for a page you sign into as somebody else once, a link a client sent you, or anything you would open in a private window in a browser.