In amongst all the various changes in the recent iOS and MacOS updates is something you might easily overlook — profiles for the Safari web browser. I’m here to tell you that if you’re a creative who uses Mac to produce output and engage on social media, you absolutely should start using this feature.
It’s exactly what you never knew you needed.
What are Safari Profiles?
A Safari profile is basically a kiosk within Safari. Any web sites you view while under one profile will not be aware of the content of other profiles. The cookies those sites set, the sessions they hold for you, and the cache they have access to, are all confined within the one profile.
So whereas previously if you wanted to be logged in to, say, Facebook, as both yourself and your brand, you would have needed to either have two different browsers running, or use one Facebook account on your computer and the other on your phone.
Now we have profiles you can just switch between them, staying logged in to different accounts on the same web site. If you’re using a Mac, you can have multiple browser windows open with a different profile used by each one.
Aside from that, profiles can also have their own associated bookmarks folder, and their own tab groups. So you can not only streamline your production workflows, you can turbo charge them.
Suggested Applications: Personal Domain
The way we all use Safari Profiles will vary from person to person, of course, but there are a couple of things I would suggest everyone does (whether a creative or not).
Two profiles everyone should set up in a particular way are:
- Personal (this is the default, and will initially contain everything you already have set up in Safari),
- Purchasing.
I’d suggest that your personal profile is used for all the “you” stuff. Random browsing, looking things up, engaging with personal social media (use a tab group for that — it will make your cyber life feel less cluttery around everything else).
In the “purchasing” profile, do all your Google/Amazon searches for products, log in to your TopCashback* account, and make all your online purchases, whether they’re for items, services, holidays… you get the idea.
Why do this? Because it will ring-fence all the many tendrils from those shopping sites, their advertisers, and the marketing services they use to follow you around. Your social media accounts — walled off as they are under a different profile — will find it far more difficult to track your spending behaviours. They can’t share cookies with partners whose sites are only used under another profile.
If you’ve ever been annoyed that you followed a link to a drum-kit your niece wanted you to look at just before Christmas, and now Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are all trying to sell you drum-kit cleaning products, this may go a long way towards solving that creepy problem.
Suggested Applications: Creative Domain
The way we all work will be very different, but in this day and age if you’re a creative it’s not unusual to have multiple identities out there, even on the same platforms.
Because we all work so individually in creative spheres it’s difficult to give a “general plan” as to how to use profiles for a generic workflow, so I will list some of my own profiles setup as an example.
So my profiles, so far, are as follows:
- Personal
- The general “uncategorised” swamp of the start page,
- Socials tab group (Insta, Facebook),
- Various other tab groups…
- Wild Lands Distant Worlds
- The Outdoors Author
- Various WordPress admin pages and this web site on the start page.
- Armada Wars
- Logged into Google under the AW account on the start page,
- Tab group for the official Armada Wars web site and its admin pages,
- Tab group for 3rd party services such as CookieHub and Printful,
- Socials tab group (Instagram, Threads, Twitter (X, whatever), Facebook),
- Reporting tab group (Mailchimp reports, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, etc),
- Marketplaces tab group, tracking retailer sites where my books are sold.
- R. Curtis Venture
- Logged into Google under the RCV account on the start page,
- Socials tab group (Linker.ee admin, Instagram, Threads, Txitter, Facebook),
- Book File Creation tab group, logged into KDP and various other publishing sites,
- Book Reviews tab group, because we all have one,
- Book Marketing (Application) tab group, tracking active ad campaigns,
- Book Marketing (Learning) tab group,
- Publishing Journey tab group,
- Book Business tab group (payment gateways, affiliate programmes, taxes, etc),
- Book Writing tab group (research research research).
- Purchasing
- Google, TopCashback*, Amazon UK home page, Amazon UK Kindle Daily Deals* on the start page,
- Camping Kit tab group.
That probably looks like a lot, but it was actually pretty quick to set up. If you followed all that and paid attention to detail you’ll note I can be logged in to Facebook under three different accounts, without having to switch browsers or devices.
The same is true for service platforms. I can now be in my Amazon Marketing account with USA Amazon credentials under the RCV profile, while shopping with my UK account in the Shopping profile, and the sessions and cookies will never meet each other.
If you’re extremely eagle-eyed, and following all of this, you will have realised that while I check web sites to ensure the retailers I distribute to have correctly displayed my books, the details of those visits are not cross-contaminating my genuine online shopping sessions.
How to Get Set Up…
To use Safari profiles you need to be on iOS 17 on an iPhone, iPadOS 17 on iPad, and MacOS Sonoma for any model of Mac computer. You don’t need to have all three of course, you can use this feature on any one of them. If you do have more than one compatible device, everything will of course sync via iCloud.
I started setting up these profiles on my iPhone, because at the time MacOS Sonoma had not yet arrived. On iPhone (and I presume also on iPad), you have to go to the settings app and create your new profiles under the Safari menu. It’s reasonably straightforward.
When you return to the Safari browser, and tap the button to switch between sites and/or tab groups, you’ll now see the tab group button has the icon for your current profile. Tap it, and you can find the tab groups of that profile (if you have just set up your profiles, you’re likely looking at your personal profile containing all pre-existing tab groups).
Right at the bottom of Tab Groups menu you’ll see the profile selector, which you use to switch profiles:
Setting up on a Mac is slightly easier, because you can do it from the Settings menu within Safari itself:
Summary
It’s now extremely easy to partition off both tasks that need carrying out, and the information you don’t want floating between different companies.
In addition, we can now switch instantly between the various personas we need to use while managing a creative enterprise that’s reliant on digital platforms.
For me, this has meant an immediate productivity boost. I’m also finding I am more likely to tackle tasks which previously I might actually have postponed. There is no longer the hassle of logging out of a site just to log in under different credentials, which then collapses all the other open sessions running for that site in different tab groups. As long as the logins are under separate profiles they are fire-walled from each other! Magical.
Have a good long play around with profiles, and see if you can find a new use case to mention in the comments!
The Outdoors Author 