View multiple Gmail accounts simultaneously in Chrome

I don't normally have multiple Gmail windows open. I have two accounts, but I use one for companies and one for friends, and the first filters into the second. However the terms of service say that you need to check your mail every so often. I take that to mean in the browser, just to be safe. Therefore once a month I like to have every Gmail account in my family get logged into once. The rest of the time they are accessed via Pop, or Imap.

I know this is not possible in Internet Explorer. There are add-ons for Firefox, but that did not appeal to me. I thought perhaps some of the new features in Chrome might present an opportunity to make this happen finally. So I googled "multiple gmail account chrome" etc. Most of the articles I read were not very encouraging. So I wanted to report that this works fine, with some initial setup required.

My most-used reference was:
http://www.labnol.org/software/create-family-profiles-in-google-chrome/4394/

What I did was first set up a new profile for each account I needed to check, which amounts to first cleaning out your default profile, then copying the profile folder to some location and duplicating it for each account, with a unique folder name. Then I created a shortcut for each profile. Then I launched Chrome via the Shortcut, logged into the particular Google account, saved the password, bookmarked Gmail, and then created an application shortcut for it.

Once that initial process is done, all I have to do to launch and view these multiple Gmail accounts at the same time, is to launch the application shortcuts. Very cool!