Why every WordPress professional should reconsider their default browser

I built Ghost Browser because of WordPress. My company built nothing but WordPress projects: client sites, our own sites, premium plugins and a WordPress SaaS service. Besides development, I handled social media, SEO, content, project management, QA, product, support and the business side. My browser, first Firefox and then Chrome, wasn’t built for switching between that many roles at once. There had to be a better way.

The problem: one site, several users

So much WordPress work means being signed in to the same site as more than one person:

1. Landing pages that show different content and forms to logged-in and logged-out visitors.
2. Protected content that changes by user role.
3. Making admin changes while watching what a non-admin sees.
4. Managing social media for several projects.
5. Testing plugins, which needs an admin and a non-admin account.
6. Account support, where a user-switching plugin only goes so far.
7. Setting up role-based admin screens for WooCommerce shop owners and managers.

Fix one: identities

Instead of a regular tab, open a tab in an identity. It’s isolated from the other tabs in the window, and its color shows which identity it belongs to. Right-click and choose Duplicate into new Temporary Identity to see the page as a logged-out visitor, without signing out of your admin account.

For QA, I open a temporary identity for every new way I can think of to break a site. My admin account stays open in another tab, so I can fix and retest straight away.

Fix two: workspaces

The real cost of an emergency is the context switch: too many tabs, being signed out of things, deciding what to save, and losing your place in the task you were in.

A workspace is a saved set of tabs that opens with one click, every tab signed in as the identity it was in. Ours for a Gravity Forms support system held:

• Gray tabs: email, Trello and Help Scout, the page and form editors, the front-end views, and the feeds to Trello, Help Scout and MailChimp.
• Purple tabs: the three-page form chain as a logged-out visitor.
• Green tabs: the same chain signed in as a non-customer.

When an urgent email came in about that form, I switched to the workspace, fixed the problem, told the person who reported it and switched back. About 10 minutes, every time. Before, I’d put off switching, because getting back into a complex task an hour later was half the work.

Switching is painless

Changing browsers has a cost. Ghost Browser imports your Chrome bookmarks, settings and extensions, so apart from identities and workspaces, it feels like the browser you already use.

By Larry Kokoszka, founder of Ghost Browser. See how developers and QA teams use it today.