Chrome keeps opening the wrong profile on a Mac

Updated 2026-09-12 · 5 min read · by Okie Dockie

What decides which profile opens

Chrome keeps a notion of the last used profile and reopens that one. It is written down when you close a window, so it moves around constantly as you work. Click the Dock icon in the morning and you get whatever you happened to be doing last night.

There is no setting to pin it. Chrome offers no "always start in this profile" option on macOS, and macOS has nothing to offer either: the Dock switches between applications, and every profile you own is the same application.

Why links from other apps land in the wrong place

When you click a link in Mail, Slack or Notes, macOS hands the URL to your default browser. That is Chrome — the application, with no profile attached. Chrome opens the link in whichever profile it considers current.

This is why a work link opens in your personal profile and immediately asks you to sign in, or worse, silently shows you the wrong account's version of a document. Nothing you can set in macOS fixes it, because the operating system has no way to express "this link belongs to that identity".

Things that look like fixes but are not

• Setting a default profile in Chrome. There is no such setting on macOS.
• Renaming or reordering profiles. Cosmetic; the last-used rule is unchanged.
• "Create Shortcut" from Chrome's menu. That makes a shortcut to a website, not a profile.
• Deleting and recreating a profile. You lose the profile's data and the behaviour is identical afterwards.
• Making the profile the first one. Default is just the folder name of whichever profile you made first; it carries no priority.

The fix that holds

Stop asking Chrome which profile to open and start telling it — by giving each profile its own icon in the Dock. Then there is no last-used rule to lose to: you click Work and you get Work.

You can build these by hand with Automator around open -na "Google Chrome" --args --profile-directory="Profile 1", but every click opens a brand new window rather than returning you to the one that profile already had — for reasons we go into here.

Okie Dockie builds the launchers for you, puts the profile's picture on each one, and makes a click bring forward that profile's existing window. Your Chrome is otherwise untouched — same logins, same extensions, same history.

It does not change what happens to links clicked in other applications; nothing can, short of per-link rules. But it removes the far more common frustration, which is reaching for a profile and getting a different one.