24 September 2026
Chrome profiles don't share bookmarks. I used Floccus.
I run two Chrome profiles on one Mac: personal and work. Bookmarks from one never show up in the other. When I’m in the work window and need a tool that already sits on my personal bar, I either hunt for it or pin it a second time.
That’s by design. A profile is a separate account: cookies, history, extensions, bookmarks. Google’s bookmark sync follows the Google account, not the fact that both profiles live on the same computer. Two accounts means two bookmark trees.
I wanted one native bookmark bar in both, without moving everything into a third bookmark manager.
I tried xBrowserSync first
My notes still pointed to xBrowserSync: free, bookmarks stay in Chrome, no extra vault. It’s still listed in the Chrome Web Store. The Store build is 1.5.2 from April 2020, Manifest V2. Chrome will not run that. You can install it, and then nothing happens.
That was the dead end. The listing survived. The extension did not, not in the browser I actually open.
Floccus writes one file to Drive
I switched to Floccus. It reads Chrome’s own bookmarks and writes them to a file you choose. I use Google Drive, a file named bookmarks.xbel, and a passphrase so the file isn’t sitting there in the clear.
The Chrome Web Store lists Floccus at about 100,000 users. That’s how common the problem is, not a queue for this post. I needed something still maintained.
What I actually did:
- Install Floccus in both profiles.
- Turn off Google’s bookmark sync in both. Otherwise two systems fight over the bar.
- In the first profile, create the store: Google Drive, the file, the passphrase.
- In the second profile, connect to the same file and type the same passphrase.
The bookmarks stay on Chrome’s bar. I didn’t move them to Raindrop or anywhere else.
The trap is the work Google account
The work profile is signed into a company Google account. Floccus does not inherit that login from Chrome. If I sign Floccus into the company account, I get a second file and the bars diverge again.
Both profiles need the Drive where the file was created. For me that’s the personal one. Chrome can stay on the company account. Floccus just doesn’t use it for bookmarks.
The compromise is deliberate: profiles still isolate cookies and work. I only share the bar.
If you’re in the same mess, start at Floccus in the Store and switch Chrome’s own bookmark sync off before you turn Floccus on.