More background in https://groups.google.com/a/google.com/d/msg/chrome-discuss/BwJ5EmEZpyM/6WOjPtiWCAAJ

Just to clarify, in your second observation, you mean that "profile B shows up with account *2*," not "account 1," correct?

This bug can basically be boiled down to: we should show the custom Chrome avatar in the toolbar when the user has explicitly set one, instead of the user's GAIA photo.

> Just to clarify, in your second observation, you mean that "profile B shows up with account *2*," not "account 1," correct?

Yes, correct, sorry about that mistake

> This bug can basically be boiled down to: we should show the custom Chrome avatar in the toolbar when the user has explicitly set one, instead of the user's GAIA photo.

This would be consistent, yes. The other way would be to show the user's Gaia photo (account 2) in the profile switcher for profile A but for me the custom Chrome avatar is more meaningful in both places.

This should actually already be the case (to show the custom avatar if there is one explicitly set).

Could you check if this problem still exists in Beta (i.e. M70)?

Repro steps:
(1) Create a new profile. In the "profile creation" flow, select a non-default avatar
(2) Navigate to google.com and sign into a Google Account
(3) Notice that the avatar in the toolbar is changed to your Google Account picture (this is the bug).
(4) Navigate to chrome://settings/manageProfile. Click on the custom avatar from that settings page that you've already selected.
(5) Notice that the toolbar picture is changed back to the custom avatar.

Thomas, what's strange is that it seems like the GAIA photo overrides the custom avatar just when the user signs in. If I go back to settings and click the custom avatar again, then it fixes itself.

@bde: could you try navigating to chrome://settings/manageProfile and clicking on the custom avatar you want to be displayed in the toolbar again? Does that fix the issue for you?

I looked a bit into the code and apparently
 - the preference that says whether a user has the default avatar is only changed when they go to chrome://settings/manageProfile
 - the preference is set to true when a new profile is created no matter what

This is obviously a bug. I'll try to fix it on Monday.

So, it seems that this change is not as trivial as I thought. The "Profile Creator"-view is a web view which consists of multiple stacked layers calling into the C++, interacting with profile configuration code.

Basically, there's a pref saying that a user is using the default avatar icon or not. This pref is initialized with true when a profile is created, independent of whether the user chose an icon during creation. If the user doesn't select an icon, the first one (i.e. the white avatar) is selected.

This makes me suggest an alternative fix:
We could add the assumption that users having the first avatar icon (i.e. the white avatar) haven't set a custom icon.
So all users with this icon are treated as having never set an icon.
This would make the change a lot easier.

What do you think Eli?

Yeah, that workaround in c#9 SGTM for now, Thomas. Thanks!