User Accounts or Browser Profiles?
Understanding user accounts
A user account allows you to sign in to your computer. By default, your computer already has one user account, which you were required to create when you set up your computer. If you plan to share your computer with others, you can create a separate user account for each person.
Why use separate user accounts?
At this point, you may be wondering why you would even need to use separate user accounts. But if you're sharing a computer with multiple people—for example, with your family or at the office—user accounts allow everyone to save their own files, preferences, and settings without affecting other computer users. When you start your computer, you'll be able to select which account you want to use.
What are browser profiles and why should I use them?
All the popular browsers, except Safari, support multiple profiles and all are created in a relatively similar fashion.
Browser profiles are pretty much what they sound like: separate browsing profiles on your web browser that you can use for different purposes or different people. Having separate browser profiles not only keeps your work and personal life separate, but also allows you to tune each browser profile for its specific uses.
You can bookmark, change your settings, use add-ons or any variety of things to make each profile suit your needs. If you mainly use your personal profile for browsing the web and online shopping, you can optimize your browser to make both of those tasks simple.
If you’ve wanted to use certain add-ons for work but have avoided them because they aren’t relevant to your personal life, you can set up your work profile to include all of those add-ons. Doing so will keep those add-ons from interfering with your leisure time while optimizing your work browser with everything you need to get the job done.
It's also possible to synchronise all of your settings if you sign-in to the individual profiles. This allows you to create the same profile on multiple devices and your settings can "follow" you between devices. It's also very handy if your equipment is damaged as it allows all of your browser settings to be restored in a relatively easy manner.
