“Sign in as Different User” missing in SharePoint 2013

As most people have realized by now, the folks over at SharePoint 2013 headquarters have remove the option for “Sign in as Different User” from the user menu.  They have posted this article about the change (also described here), and how to work around it.  However, reading the fine print “This option uses an unsupported browser feature which is unreliable and causes other issues. Currently this option does not work in IE 10 and Safari.”  Well, that’s just not going to cut it then, as I’m on Windows 8, and IE10 isn’t exactly an option for me.  Another suggestion using bookmarklets can be found here, but again, I’m not sure that can be trusted in all browsers.  Instead, at the itgroove office, we simply added the link back in by following this blog post.

And yay!  We’re all happy again.

Be aware

So, just to be clear, MS removed this for a reason, and even though it’s not entirely clear why, here are some resources I’ve found as to why it may have happened.

• Stefan Gossner: http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_gossner/archive/2012/01/19/be-careful-when-using-the-quot-sign-in-as-different-user-quot-feature-in-sharepoint.aspx
• Most likely to do with caching issues and users having access to areas they shouldn’t have/not having access to areas they should due to non-expired browser cache
• Gokan Ozcifci:
  SharePoint 2013: Sign in As Different User
• Blog post here.
• Very detailed about both how to go about the various options to workaround the problem, and why they probably took this option out.