I've been playing around with profiles on the newly updated Safari. How do you move a window or tab from one Profile to another Profile? Sometimes when I click on links in email, it opens up in the wrong Profile (e.g., Personal) when I really want it to open in my Work Profile. However, I can't find a way to move a window that is in Personal Profile over to Work Profile. Yes, I can manually copy and paste but that defeats the idea of something more seamless or semi-automated.
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Safari: How to move window or tab from one Profile to another Profile
- Thread starter msackey
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I'm just now playing with the new Profiles feature, and have the same question. Prior to setting up a couple new profiles, I had probably 30-40 tabs open in my 'personal' profile. How am I supposed to sort those tabs into the new profiles? Is copy/paste the only option? That does seem odd...
A page is more than just the URL that you typed into the address bar. A page usually has a full-blown application running inside it with application state such as login information and many, many other things. That state would have to be moved along with the page, since Safari keeps that data completely separate for each profile. On the surface it seems like Apple could have just reviewed the contents of Settings/Privacy/Manage Website Data and moved the entries along with the page being moved to the new profile. But that's a hard problem and is likely impossible to achieve.
To do it, one thing they'd have to consider is that some of the entries in that data could be associated with more than one tab and you might only be moving one of them; so sometimes they'd move the entries and other times they would have to copy them. A likely insurmountable problem is that there could be conflicts when moving a tab to a another profile - the named domain could already exist in the target profile's data and there would be no way to merge the entries from the source and target profile. Only the webpage developers would know if that is possible. A simple example is if two different profiles have the same website open but logged in as different users. The application I'm currently working on could support that, but many websites couldn't - they might share login information between all open tabs (within a profile).
Maybe Apple could provide a simple way to just open the URL's from a collection of tabs in a new profile. But, many of those tabs would not be in the state they were in before; sometimes they'd be in completely unusable states. Users would complain and consider it to be an Apple bug.
I don't see what Apple can do about this. It's even hard for them to explain why they didn't try to do it. It could be that Apple's profiles are an example of "no good deed goes unpunished". They're going to take a lot of heat as users try to deal with hundreds of legacy tabs that they want to organize into profiles.
To do it, one thing they'd have to consider is that some of the entries in that data could be associated with more than one tab and you might only be moving one of them; so sometimes they'd move the entries and other times they would have to copy them. A likely insurmountable problem is that there could be conflicts when moving a tab to a another profile - the named domain could already exist in the target profile's data and there would be no way to merge the entries from the source and target profile. Only the webpage developers would know if that is possible. A simple example is if two different profiles have the same website open but logged in as different users. The application I'm currently working on could support that, but many websites couldn't - they might share login information between all open tabs (within a profile).
Maybe Apple could provide a simple way to just open the URL's from a collection of tabs in a new profile. But, many of those tabs would not be in the state they were in before; sometimes they'd be in completely unusable states. Users would complain and consider it to be an Apple bug.
I don't see what Apple can do about this. It's even hard for them to explain why they didn't try to do it. It could be that Apple's profiles are an example of "no good deed goes unpunished". They're going to take a lot of heat as users try to deal with hundreds of legacy tabs that they want to organize into profiles.
I have found only one way and only on MacOS moving a single open tab to another profile: open one safari window with one profile, a second window with the other profile and drag and drop the tab from one window to the other. I haven‘t found a way to do that in iOS, however,
you can move entire tab groups from one profile to another on iOS and MacOS. So you could create a tab group from the tab you’d like to move and move that tabgroup to the other profile, then sort the tab to wherever you’d like it to be. A bit tedious, but at least there is a way.
Oh that's very interesting! I just tried part of what you said: moving a tab from one profile to another. It works, with some caveat. I think what macOS Safari is doing is copying the URL to the other profile, but the other parts don't transfer (such as login information) which makes sense as someone else explained it. But nevertheless, this is good news especially when I click on a, say, an email link from work address and it opens in my Personal rather than Work profile.
I experimented with moving my tab opened to this forum on my Personal profile (where I'm logged in) to my Work profile (where I'm not logged in to MacRumors). When the tab opens in Work, I can see I'm not logged into MacRumors, but when I drag the tab back to Personal, I'm logged in.
Thanks for the discovery and reporting it!
So it looks like you can move a Tab Group to a different profile, but there's no built-in way to move a tab (i.e., webpage) from one profile to the other. Or at least it doesn't seem so.