Every guide, comparison and detector run we have published under profiles.
A profile directory holds cookies, storage and increasingly passkeys that cannot be re-issued if the directory is lost. Copying a raw Chromium user-data folder between machines usually fails quietly.
Any page can make Chrome download gigabytes of on-device AI models, once per profile, through that profile's proxy. The two obvious switches either change what the page sees or keep the download and stop security updates, so the fix went into the engine.
Handing a browser environment to someone else comes down to three choices - export a file, share a link, or transfer ownership - and each one trades a different amount of control for convenience. Here's exactly what you keep, what you give up, and what revoking can and can't undo.
Most of the software you pay for can only be operated by hand. Three reasons a product ends up unreachable, thirteen categories where the demand for driving your own account from code actually is, how the four families of answer on the market break, and the eight properties that decide whether such a layer survives production.
A script that opens one browser per task creates one profile per task, and every tool that lists profiles then has to list them forever. Temporary profiles go in a separate tree the desktop app never reads, and nothing in it is deleted for you, which is the point.
A loop that opens 400 browsers should not decide that you now have 400 cloud profiles. The sync option has three states rather than two, and the difference between the default and an explicit false is the part worth understanding.