Google Chrome is adding support for “ephemeral Guest profiles.” This feature is already available to schools and businesses using Chrome.

Update: This is now available on the Canary channel on Chrome. So, how does it work?

With regular Guest profile, you are not much different from an Incognito window.

Now, here is Guest Profile with the new “Ephemeral Guest Profiles” flag enabled:

It gives me an option to log in to Chromesync. I can still see “Guest” option. However, this is an early version of this feature and this may not be the final UI.

Ephemeral Guest Profiles

What is an Ephemeral profile?

The word “Ephemeral” means lasting for a very short time. In simple words, this is a temporary guest profile.

According to the official guide on Guest profiles, “in Guest mode, you won’t see or change any other Chrome profile’s info. When you exit Guest mode, your browsing activity is deleted from the computer.”

Google Chrome already has an option to switch to Guest profile from the profile menu. This seems to be tweak to this feature.

I do not have any additional details to share at this moment. However, I am hoping to see the new experimental flag for this feature in the Canary version of Google Chrome in the coming days.

In the meantime, here is what an Ephemeral profile does, according to the official documentation for Chrome for Enterprise.

“To enable your employees to work from their personal laptop or a shared device that they trust, you can force the Chrome profile to be ephemeral by policy. Forcing ephemeral mode reduces the chances of any browsing information being left behind on their device.”

According to the same document, users in ephemeral guest mode will have access to “the full extent of a browser session including:

• Signing in for Chrome sync
• Cloud print
• Cloud policy
• Password storage
• Bookmarks
• Autofill and other data normally present in the user profile
• Any corporate assets that are enabled in ephemeral mode, which may include corporate webmail, documents, and intranet pages”

Conclusion

Will we get the same set of features in the regular consumer version of Chrome that we all use?

That’s something that I will be testing when this feature lands in the Chrome Canary channel.

Have you used ephemeral guest profiles for Chrome? Do you have additional details to share? Let me know in the comments section below.

Source: Chromium Gerrit.