That varies by user. I’ve never found a hotel that had no-web access without web-access; the opposite, too many times. And I find google’s own user interface perfectly user-friendly, plus it doesn’t require me to set up anything else and I can use it from any computer.
You can be logged in to more than one Google account at once. I always am at work. I have my work email and my personal email open, in the same browser (different tabs). Under the account name at the top right you just click the drop down menu and choose which account you want in that tab.
You can have at least three google accounts open at once; probably many more. I have a Google account with a Yahoo email address which I use for posting on Google Groups and I can have all three in the dropdown menu, no problem.
This is the method I use.
I currently need to have four different Gmail accounts available concurrently on my main computer, each able to access the related YouTube, Google Drive, etc pages as well as Gmail itself. Constantly logging into and out of accounts in a single browser would be a nightmare.
So, I have one account running in Firefox, one in Chrome, one in Safari, and one in Opera. I have links on my taskbar for each (as Astro wanted to do in post #11) so I can launch each quickly.
A bonus of using different browsers is that there is a visual clue as to which account is currently onscreen, which makes it less likely that I will upload a video to the wrong YouTube account.
You have three easy options…
1)Make sure the guest logs out and then Ctrl-Delete’s her user name from the drop down box. It’s easy, but too easy to forget. But it’s what you should do now to clean up her tracks.
2)Have her use a different browser. That is, if your wife uses IE, have the friend use Firefox. If she uses Firefox, have the friend use Chrome. As long as everyone is on a different browser, your wife won’t even be able to tell someone else used the computer as far as email accounts being logged into the wrong name or not being able to pull things up as quickly since the history is screwed up. For example, right now, I can type s-t-down arrow-enter" and get to The Straight Dope User CP" But if I have friends use my computer, suddenly doing that (and not paying attention) will take me to Starbucks.com because one of them went to that page.
3)Have her use Private browsing. This is, IMO, what she should be doing and it’s what I always do if I use someone else’s computer. This will have a different name on each browser. It makes everything act exactly the same, but doesn’t leave any kind of trail. No cookies are set (which makes some websites not work), no websites or email accounts remain logged in, no drop down boxes have new things in the autofill etc…But, if she’s browsing the web with your wife, the current history/autofills etc are still present so that can be helpful.
Fair enough but you are coming from a perspective of universal internet connection and unlimited data caps. Not everyone has that.
For example we go to our holiday home regularly and there is no internet there. However it is useful to be able to browse emails and work with documents all of which are already held on my off-line laptop.
As mentioned above, you CAN certainly be logged in to multiple Gmail accounts on the same computer at the same time, and the last active one will remain active. Signing out of Gmail will sign you out of all logged in accounts.
You can also deal with this by:
- Creating another Windows/OSX user account
- Creating another BROWSER user account (both Firefox and Chrome support this; not sure about IE)
- Using another browser that your wife doesn’t already use (this will give your guest a whole separate set of cookies and logins)
- Using an Private Browsing (Firefox)/Incognito (Chrome)/InPrivate (Internet Explorer) window, which will give your guest a TEMPORARY blank set of cookies that go away as soon as she closes the browser