Profiles are great. I've used them for years. Much better than containers, which separate your data sort-of-but-not-quite. A profile folder has everything. You can copy it, back it up, plug it into a completely new Firefox installation later.
That portability is a killer feature, but scriptability needs to be improved. The manual says you can do:
>`firefox --profile <path> Start with profile at <path>`
But that will not work as expected if you have more than one profile (which is the whole point). At present the only workable solution is to fiddle with a GUI thru `about:profiles` (or `firefox --ProfileManager`) in order to create the profiles and give them all-important UIDs. And then do:
>`firefox -P <UID>`
It may seem small, but I've found that this is a serious roadblock. I wish it could be fixed so as to make profiles entirely scriptable.
PS: to be clear, after the futzing with the GUI to create the profiles, my script works (well!) at opening windows in the right profile, this way: (1) Check if the given profile is already launched: `ps -eo args | grep -E ".(firefox).(-P $UID)" | grep -v grep > /dev/null` (2) Do `firefox -P $UID --new-instance $url` if it isn't, and `--new-tab` if it is. Inelegant, but very reliable.
> Much better than containers, which separate your data sort-of-but-not-quite
What is better depends on the use case. For me, containers are magic, because I can be logged into eg 2-3 different microsoft accounts simultaneously in the same window. With profiles or other browsers I would need to open a different window for each, which would be unnecessary and impractical. This is extremely convenient for me, containers is the feature I cannot currently browse without. Sometimes "separate your data sort-of-but-not-quite" may be exactly what you may need.
This combined with "Always Open Site in Container", that pins a site to a specific container makes it almost invisible to me when moving between profiles.
I have several sites I only want to open with specific profiles and this workflow is a pain with Chrome. (click link with wrong profile, copy url, close tab, open a new browser, select profile, paste url, open site with correct profile.)
I really like the "Always Open Site in Container" along with "Limit to Designated Sites" once it's set up, but I wish there was a way to make it accept wildcards otherwise I have to manually add localhost:8080, localhost:8081, etc. Manually adding a dozen or more becomes painful.
I find that for dev workflows (even outside firefox containers) to not mix up badly, you end up needing to split localhost anyway - so for example, binding to specific IPs inside 127.0.0.1/8 (it's a whole /8, you're usually not running out of that), or, depending on how badly you need ::1/IPv6 bindings, service.localhost6 or service.localhost6.localdomain6 style names instead of just localhost.
It’s so odd that there is no way to edit the list of sites manually. Now, the only way to ”Always Open Site in Container” is to first browse to that page. That’s not just inconvenient for batch edits, what’s worse is that you can end up in a redirection deadlock, with no chance to edit which container the first url should open in.
Agree, containers are exactly what I want and I use them all the time. Profiles are too much isolation, like installing separate VMs to run processes in a completely isolated way when something like Docker is fine.
The key element here is switching windows across profiles. Safari almost gets this right but fails in the UI imho. Edge has "workspaces" that could almost work but they don't provide isolation.
My biggest struggle with containers is that I constantly accidentally shift out of them without noticing. I never remember that the default "new tab" keyboard shortcut doesn't respect the current container.
In Windows 10 I have shortcuts pinned to my taskbar that are just
> ...firefox.exe" -P "profilename"
and then `taskbar.grouping.useprofile true` so only windows from the same profile are grouped together and some custom recolored Firefox icons for those pinned shortcuts and custom per-profile userChrome.css styling (#TabsToolbar background-color) for easy visual differentiation of a window's profile.
For Windows 10, no scripting is needed. Just the initial GUI profile setup.
I haven't messed with Firefox's PWA feature/taskbar-tabs[1] but it seems like under the hood it's just using shortcuts so you're probably looking for -taskbar-tab
This redditor looks like he's doing close to what you're asking with the caveat of needing an entry in taskbartabs.json to use -taskbar-tab (and maybe Windows OS only) [2]
I don't think it's completely chromeless but you can probably hide everything via custom CSS:
ctrl+shift+i (dev tools) -> f1 (settings)
check advanced settings:
enable browser chrome and add-on debugging
enable remote debugging
ctrl+shift+alt+i (browser dev tools)
Find element IDs or class names and try out CSS rules to your heart's content.
Set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets = true and put your changes in Firefox/Profiles/$profilename/chrome/userChrome.css.
Remember to turn off the advanced settings when you're done.
For Win 10, I set this up a while ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy but the key was the `taskbar.grouping.useprofile true` setting. I think after that's set Firefox and Windows did some AUMID shenanigans on profile launch.
I just made a new profile as a test and this is what I did:
...firefox.exe" -P -> create a new profile (ie. "newprofilename")
about:config set `taskbar.grouping.useprofile = true` (when I originally did this for many profiles I believe I copied prefs.js that already had it set)
close and reopen that profile instance. I used ...firefox.exe" -P "newprofilename" but any method of launching the profile should work. It should now be in a separate taskbar group.
Pin that new group to taskbar. Also modify its shortcut target to add -P "newprofilename"
Now you're done.
Normally I also renamed the pinned shortcut to something sane and then I changed the icon. I took the normal Firefox icon (I think w/ GIMP) and just messed with the colors via saturation or something so it was easy to tell the difference. I remember changing the shortcut icon had some headache but I sadly didn't write notes.
Also, I didn't set grouping.useprofile on all my profiles, just the profiles I wanted separately pinned on my taskbar. My default profile is pinned normally without grouping.useprofile set.
>from terminal [opening URLs in instances using profile paths] works exactly as expected regardless of how many profile instances are currently running or their state.
That's interesting. It didn't work a couple of years ago, perhaps it's been fixed.
Tried containers when it was released but found it very inconvenient to manage. If I understand this solution doesn't even let you have two profiles open at once? That's even less useful imho.
edit: I use Simple Tab Groups which is far more featureful - "Send tab to [group/container/etc]" for example is table stakes.
Of course you can have them open at once, that's what's useful. I have four! And I can open subsequent windows in the right profile, no problem. But it required non-trivial scripting.
I have 3 different profiles, one for each of my current customers and one personal.
Within the customer profiles, I have containers for things like different AWS accounts (although AWS now has that as part of the console), I can have logins to test systems and production systems etc.
The automation of containers is good too, tied to URLs.
Note that `--no-remote` breaks starting new browser windows from outside, which users normally want.
I'm starting to think that setting the `HOME` environment variable is the only way to really make things isolated - this still won't handle `~insertusernamehere` but basically everything else respects it.
On windows powershell I do
Start-Process "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -ArgumentList "-P default-release"
Which is the exact same idea.
Yes, I tried that and everything else. Either it refuses to launch with `--new-instance` or (from memory, in the case of your command) subsequent `--new-tab`s may open in the wrong profile. Presumably due to the order in which the original instances were created. The point is that the system turns on these UIDs, which are not paths or even hashes of paths.
Another roadblock that I've encountered is moving a tab between profiles. For a multitude of reasons, foremost between them research, I would often come across a tab that I know would be useful for one of my other research subjects. If the profile in question is closed, there is too much friction to open it, copy the url, paste into a new tab, then close the profile again.
A single "Send to profile" option would be such a boon to productivity.
> A profile folder has everything. You can copy it, back it up, plug it into a completely new Firefox installation later.
These new profiles seem to be slightly different from the old ones?
[edit: ignore most of the stuff below, see replies]
The new UI doesn't show your other regular profiles and when you create a new profile via the new UI, it also doesn't create a separate profile folder (it's part of your active profile). They're like sub profiles... probably to allow everything to be synced via a Firefox account?
We can still move the profile folder. The difference is that what's created with the new UI is part of that folder (the old about:profiles page is still there and old style profiles are still supported).
You're right. For some reason I couldn't see the folders being created, but after restarting Firefox (about:profiles required me to do after creating profiles with the new UI), they are created.
Do you know if there's any way to have old profiles showing on this new UI?
> But that will not work as expected if you have more than one profile (which is the whole point). At present the only workable solution is to fiddle with a GUI thru `about:profiles` (or `firefox --ProfileManager`) in order to create the profiles and give them all-important UIDs.
FWIW, that's only true if you care about it having those IDs and being exposed to the graphical interface. If you don't, then you can just run `firefox --profile $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/whatever` and it works. I use a small shell script™ wrapper to run firefox this way and it's quite nice. Also helpful: If you run firefox like that, you can just point it at a new empty directory and it'll populate it as a profile, so it's easy to make new ones too.
Ah, right. TBH I mostly just don't do that, but I did throw together a script that takes a URL and just puts it on the clipboard and uses notify-send to tell you about it, so I can just paste into whichever window I want (and then tell the system that that script is my preferred "browser" to open http(s) URLs). This obviously adds a little friction, but it makes it trivial to open links in any browser/profile/window/tab-group I want.
Yessss, I've been wondering how to script different FF profiles (just haven't had enough time/motivation). That was the only thing holding me back from making it my daily driver.
A roadblock to what workflow? I just have -p in my firefox shortcut and it shows the profile manager every time I launch. I have 6 profiles I use regularly.
Unfortunately I don't think you can just transfer willy nilly between firefox versions, at a certain point downgrades don't work, and I'm just trying to figure out where that point is (can you move to ESR for example)
The most useful feature with the worst UX. You have to type about:profiles and then create a new profile. But imagin you now want to move old profiles to a new computer and FF happens to run in a Flatpack. Yeah, much fun
You can (now?) create profiles from the account icon in the toolbar [1] and at least on my firefox install, you can also do it from the hamburger menu.
I use firefox via flatpak and had no issues so far accessing profile data (in one of the folders in ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/firefox/ - I keep a regular archive of the entire folder as backup).
I'm on 144.0.2 on MacOS and I do have it. Under the hamburger menu in the upper right and near the top of the list. Never set up a profile on this machine before, so maybe that could be related?
I found out about profiles recently and I just couldn't believe that that's the standard way to access them. Also, it's not obvious which profile you are currently on, so there are some silly but necessary workarounds like having a dummy bookmark with the profile name on each or something like that, while it could just be a string next to the address bar.
It works really well though. Does exactly what I would expect and hope from such a feature.
Huh, I had no idea the <profile> argument to -P is optional (--help does not say), I was always using --ProfileManager instead. Nice quality of life improvement, thanks for the information!
That used to be a start menu entry in the old days. I had heard it was removed but to my surprise -P works on my current linux. I'll have to see if it does actually start a new profile.
Use -p in your shortcut to firefox and it will show the profile manager on launch, from that you can easily create a new profile or open a new window on existing one.
for the most part I've been using Firefox containers and loving that life of getting the same benefits without having to create separate profiles.
but it's nice to see this finally get into Firefox because there are still a lot of folks who also want to maintain things like browser bookmarks, passwords etc in a separate profile. that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers (which IMHO is slightly better than having to manage multiple profiles)
> that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers
But thats a massive difference.
I have work profiles and a personal profile. I have password manager profiles for clients (clients will provide their own PM logins to segregate their access) which are different between them, and having separate profiles is huge.
Containers are great, especially for crappy websites that use your sessions for tracking which page you are on, but they are no where near powerful enough.
You've hit on the relevant distinction: user context vs system context.
I use containers to separate system context (partitioning cookies and site data) while remaining in the same user context (e.g. "personal browsing").
I use profiles for when I need different user contexts (different bookmarks and frequently used sites for different clients or projects).
When only one tool is available, you are limited by the constraints of that tool (e.g. bookmarks bleeding over between user contexts when using containers, or having to copy extensions or bookmarks into every profile).
> I use profiles for when I need different user contexts (different bookmarks and frequently used sites for different clients or projects).
This is the part where the new Firefox profiles fall short. I just checked and cannot create two separate profiles with the same email address. So it's not possible tohave different profiles for different _projects_ at work, for example.
Containers are the way to go with this, but then they are not exactly intuitive. Arc got this right and Zen is showing a lot of promise.
I like to have it both ways. Given the options available so far I've preferred to have bookmarks shared between both and mainly keep tabs / working context separate.
The best I've managed so far is to run separate instances of Firefox with the same Sync Account which appear as separate 'devices'. Nightly with a different icon and theme makes it obvious which is which.
This way if I come across something interesting I want dig into further on my own time, I can bookmark it as well as 'Send Tab To Device -> Home' or 'Phone' depending on where I want to be and what environment I want to have available when I see it later (e.g. read only, or hands on).
Yes, I may be hoarding a lot of tabs but that's a separate issue...
Cookies can already be partitioned. I am not sure if it's default but at the very least it's a config flag. It's called site isolation. I have seen Firefox people say containers kind of become unnecessary with this in place in terms of privacy but they kind of have an opaque whitelist to get some things to work. The biggest example is google properties.
that's fair (and glad profiles have finally arrived in FF for that reason); personally, i don't use password managers linked to any specific browser but i can understand your use case.
> that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers
Actually, I have wanted better profile support for a while to segregate addons. There are plenty of addons that I want to use occasionally that require full data access. I generally do trust them, but even so, I keep these in a separate profile just in case. That is something that can't be done with containers.
> There are plenty of addons that I want to use occasionally that require full data access. I generally do trust them...
Seconded, except I don't trust most add-ons and don't want to have to trust them.
I want an easy way to launch a disposable browser session in any browser, totally isolated, with add-ons chosen (and downloaded) at launch time, and then erased of with the rest of the session when its last open page is closed.
I think Firefox focus does that on android, I'm sure there's a way to get the same result on a desktop with some flags and pointing to a config file (or a read only profile folder maybe?)
AFAIK Firefox Focus doesn't have extensions at all:( Although yes, it effectively has only private/incognito sessions that are erased when you close the app.
Beyond its UI having basically been frozen since Netscape Navigator 4-ish modulo XUL shenanigans?
The new Profile Manager (that doesn't yet entirely replace the old one, both exist side-by-side for the moment) uses icons and colors to better differentiate profiles at a glance.
Additionally links to the new Profile Manager are now in the Account menu and feel a bit more like an "account chooser" (comparable to Chrome's experience, especially) and lot less like a power user feature hidden behind a page address that people might not know ("about:profiles").
That's what I fear happening, and I will not like it.
> comparable to Chrome's experience
If I wanted to have "Chrome's experience" I would have used Chrome. Profiles is one way Firefox has been vastly better. Selecting the last used Profile is one press on Enter on startup and selecting a different one is a matter of pressing up/down a few times and pressing Enter or typing the first few (unique) characters of the profile name and pressing Enter. I can't think of a UI that would be faster, I think this has already reached the maximum UX for decades. This all works nicely, because it looks, feels and behaves like a native window (don't know if it is).
> lot less like a power user feature hidden behind a page address that people might not know ("about:profiles").
Why is everyone comparing it to the "hidden debug site" instead of the old profiles UI? Yeah no shit, about:profiles is not discoverable to the average user, much like all the other about: pages, but why would anyone not debugging the browser use it over the normal profiles UI?
> Beyond its UI having basically been frozen since Netscape Navigator 4-ish modulo XUL shenanigans?
I don't think this is a bad thing. I vastly prefer native(?-like) UI, way more over yet another Metro-UI clone with sluggish behaviour and no keyboard bindings.
Wanted this for years, and was one of the blockers that made Firefox impossible to really use. It looks like they're copying Chromium's UI (which is good, since it was superior to Firefox's about:profiles, for reasons others have mentioned).
But neither this post, nor the splash screen which links to this, nor any of the menu options, actually say how to use "profiles". I can't find it in an internet search either, instead coming up with Firefox's old about:profiles solution. Nor is it enabled using the little user icon in the browser bar, nor is it activated with the same shortcut as Chromium profiles.
I eventually found it in their knowledge base, and it appears to be locked behind a sign in button under the profile icon? Or my (up to date) browser lacks the button? This is such a confusing experience.
The user experience was abysmal, it was practically a non-feature. Can't be invoked quickly using two keyboard shortcuts, does not divide into simple and portable folders, etc.
This update seems to fix those problems, by copying Chromium's UX.
I've been using Firefox profiles for years, never had an issue with them, the UI, or how to access the functionality. Sure it wasn't immediately easy to find and use but I never really got a lot of the criticism. Coloured themes (which them seem to be integrating) was an easy way to differentiate the profile I was using, especially when I had multiple open at once.
Glad it's getting an update, hope it doesn't ruin a decent feature.
The confusing part of this is there are now two distinct kinds of profiles: the old profiles that you create through about:profiles and the new profiles that you create in this profile switcher, which appear to be nested within the old profile
They should make it a bit more clear they added features that were not there before and what, as it is not clear to me what has changed from before that I tried using them. Apparently it seems better now, but no wonder most commenters do not realise this is about some new features not about the old.
1. You can now launch and manage profiles from a menu hidden in the account menu (feels like the wrong place to put it, but shows up for me even though I'm not signed in)
2. Mozilla actually cares about profiles again. The feature felt mostly abandoned before, nearly inaccessible without command line flags or the very bare-bones and ugly about:profiles
Still difficult to tell for me. I enabled `browser.profiles.enabled` and now there's Profiles in the hamburger menu. However, it only shows a default profile. It does not show any other existing profiles.
So far I see that it is easier to create/open/swap between different profiles (before the easiest way was literally the terminal). There is a small icon next to firefox dock icon on macos for each profile that you can choose, which I do not remember before. So you can easily distinguish which icon corresponds to which profile window. And that you can edit the theme for each profile easier.
I wish I could open another profile in one click and/or one hotkey.I have two profiles (pro and personal) and it isn't possible to open the other with a keyboard shortcut. It's also 3-clicks minimum. Not the best UX they could do…
Profiles for the typical Work/Personal separation with their own bookmarks, extensions, password manager accounts etc……
Then I use containers for isolating sensitive accounts within those profiles (bank, work Google Drive, etc).
I also use temporary containers to make it easier to be logged into the same site with multiple accounts at the same time between tabs - like admin and user accounts for our company’s app - which also make it easier to clear sessions and data.
The growing consensus seems to be: containers are what services you want to separate from each other (cross-service tracking cookies, etc) and profiles are what services you want to separate for yourself (workflows/projects/work versus fun, etc).
So… what's changing? Profiles have been there for decade(s), is it just an alternative UI for folks who were unable to run firefox -p, or is there anything more substantial?
What a shocker right?
I guess everyday normal people do dot use a command prompt much less open a terminal to open a browser profile.
They like to click and icon and create/switch profile. Chrome, edge and many other browsers had this feature for ever. Not having ability to easily switch profiles is only reason I did not switch to Firefox full time even though I quite like the multi containers extension in Firefox for managing bazillion AWS accounts.
I'd been doing that somewhat too, but also a mix of the old -ProfileManager. The new UI is shiny enough I may consider consolidating to just one Edition, though I haven't decided which Edition yet.
(Fun fact, you can even switch to the Developer Edition default profile from regular Firefox with the -ProfileManager though that is not generally a good idea because Developer Edition is intentionally a half-step version or two ahead of "retail" Firefox. Developer Edition assumes you don't mind being a little bit closer to the bleeding edge. Still not the same as using Firefox Nightly as your daily driver, but still often a "power user preview" version.)
Finally. I know that profiles have been supported for a long time, but about:profiles wasn't that user friendly and on macOS, profiles could also mess your dock icon, wouldn't open in the foreground, etc. It wasn't a good experience.
I think the new profiles will cause some confusion (at least initially) because these profiles are not listed on the old about:profiles page and the old profiles are not listed on the new UI.
Still, a good improvement for me. I no longer need to use the dev/nightly channels or 3rd party browsers based on FF just to have different bookmarks/settings/extensions. I'll need a way to add old profiles to the new UI though.
That's great for part of HN users, just not for most Firefox users. I guess that's they already had the old interface and are making it more user friendly with the new UI :-)
Firefox profiles have worked really well for me for years. I only have two complaints. (a) I like to configure my tools, and setting prefs via user.js has just never really worked - anything there is ignored. Probably it's just because of my particular setup, but I eventually gave up on it. (b) It would be super nice if profiles could [edit:] share common prefs. I certainly don't expect the developers to make it a feature, and it seems like fixing (a) and using symlinks would do it. But overall, yeah profiles work great.
The point of profiles is that they are completely isolated from each other, like separate installs, so I don't think starting to share preferences would be great.
What an extremely confusing blog post! I don't understand why it seemingly presents profiles as a new feature? Firefox has had profiles for years. What the heck is new?
It looks like AI slop to me.
"Profiles in Firefox aren’t just a way to clean up your tabs. They’re a way to set boundaries, protect your information and make the internet a little calmer." - classic meaningless comparison.
If it's buried in about:config, it's not a feature, it's just a dev tool. (FWIW, I read that config settings may reset during updates, so at best it's just a temporary patch.)
It's like saying you have a responsive website, but only if I edit the layout in the DOM.
For some reason neither my Dark Mode add-on nor the built in reader mode (which also makes pages dark as I prefer) work on that page. Very annoying; will skip reading that to preserve my eyes.
I don't understand some of these comments. Start firefox, pick profile, opens a window in the selected profile.
The only weirdness is when you have multiple windows of different profiles opened at the same time and you open a link from a different application it may open it in the last used window which may not be the one you wanted. But then you can of course just drag and drop the tab from one window to the other.
I use containers in Firefox and have good to semi good experience. Will try this out. My main issue with containers so far is SSO. I have some things like GitHub etc I like to keep in my coding container. Then domains that only belong to work. But my company uses SSO in GitHub. It makes the usage really awkward. Start in GitHub container, login jumps to Work container and links back to GitHub container and fails since the cookies created by the login container are not set.
But to separate shopping and finance related things it works great. But I will give this a go since I have finally a harder separation between work and private usage of my coding and ai usage etc.
That whole "Profiles don't/aren't just $THIS; they're also $THAT" construction is classic LLM output. Then you've got the weird confusing inconsistencies like calling profiles a new feature when they aren't and there's also the rule of 3 ("avatars, colours, naming", "set boundaries, protect your information and make the internet a little calmer"). It all feels machine-written. Even the comparison of tidying your tabs to setting boundaries seems meaningless. It's just the sort of empty parallels AI loves to make.
It's a short article but I really had to power through it because with every sentence I kept thinking, this is not written by a human. If it is AI-generated slop, that'd explain why some parts of it doesn't make any sense.
Someone in a past thread here mentioned how they enjoyed the help of LLMs to generate all their PR marketing nonsense blurbs, because they looked just as good as the real thing.
It might have been 2-3 years ago but I still joke about this with coworkers when the conversations shift to "AI".
An idea we'll have to start getting used to is that people who read enough of the slop might begin to emulate it without necessarily meaning to. The homogeneity will be contagious.
I still don't quite understand where ChatGPT and its pals learned this. Sure, all these PR copywriters are notoriously bad at writing, but still, I don't think I often met all this crap in many texts before. I mean, if I did, I wouldn't be noticing it now as that ChatGPT style. So why does it write like that? Is it even how Anthropic models write as well (never used them)? Is it some OpenAI RL artifact, or is it something deeper, something about the language itself?
I cannot even always quite formulate, what irks me about its output so much. Except for that "it's not X, it's Y" pattern. For non-English it may be easier, because it really just cannot use idioms properly, it's super irritating. But I wouldn't say it doesn't know English. Yet it somehow always manages to write in uncannily bad style.
Looks like you are much worse at understanding writing than you think.
Contrasting, rule of three, etc. are basic writing techniques that are common among good writers because they are good. This is the reason why AI learned to use them - because they work very well in communication.
I think the idiom by itself is good, and that could be the reason why LLMs prefer it: a hypothetical test groups liked it.
The problem comes from that LLM prefers it way too often.
And I suppose it would be a bit difficult to change it to actually be good: even if it just used it once per session, it might still choose to use it on every session, as it cannot see how much an idiom has been used in other ones.
New feature blablabla... Hey, Mozilla - how about fixing the multiyear old bug, which has like several dozen tickets in bugzilla alone, about randomly losing all open tabs? What good are profiles to me, if one of most important of the secondary features of a browser is fundamentally broken and unreliable? I'm so pissed at Mozilla for their attitude (nothing new really, after the Ugly Bar update and those comments on reddit). If there was a real third browser on Windows I would have jumped ship, despite running FF since beta, both on PC and mobile. Just last month FF managed to kill all my open tabs a third time this year, and that's after no error, completely normal PC shutdown and boot next day. (ps: I know about scrounger)
Profiles have always been great, but it's kind of unfortunate that this feature seems to be locked behind a sign-in (the link in the article describes the UI as being in the profile menu).
I mean, I've been using about:profiles for ages, but it would definitely be nice to have a bit more polish (e.g. every now and again I forget that a newly created profile is automatically promoted to default)
[edit] well seems I have to eat my words - there's a switch in about:config named "browser.profiles.enabled" that toggles a profiles menu item with some UI that apparently has existed for years. Nice!
You're right, it seems both the UI and the old about:profiles page do use the same underlying implementation, but the UI does not pick up any profiles added through the about: page. If you create a new profile from the UI, that will show up in about (after a restart).
Been using profiles for some years now and they are great. I usually start with the default profile, then navigate to "about:profiles" to open all I need. Thanks to profiles, when my manjaro install broke, I migrated to NixOS and all my browsing sessions were ready to use the way I left them. Getting a dedicated, more integrated UI for managing profile will be great.
The one thing I'm missing is "incognito" profiles - e.g. spawn a temporary profile (without any identity attached) easily when I'm researching/navigating unusual sites and kill it once I'm done. Having multiple of these would be a great improvement over normal incognito windows (which share identities).
I've used profiles for a long time, but they have some annoyances.
One thing I really want is a comprehensive system for transferring/syncing only certain data between profiles. Profiles contain some data that is specific to, well, a particular browsing profile (like open tabs), but also data that is really more specific to me as a person (like font preferences). And then each extension can have its own settings or data that I may or may not want to transfer. I always have to look up old articles on Mozilla wiki and hope they're still accurate when I want to transfer certain data/settings between profiles while neither nuking everything nor copying everything. It would be great to have a sort of "data browser" that let me pick and choose certain data and then create a new profile from that.
The other disappointing thing to me is how they talk about profiles (and container tabs) as related to different usage patterns like work, home, etc. I mean, yeah, that's cool, but what I really want (certainly from container tabs, sometimes from profiles as well) is site isolation. I don't just want one profile for my work Gmail and another for my personal Gmail. I want one container tab for "everything Google", isolated from the rest, to minimize Google's tracking. But, like I said above, I still want all my personal preferences uniform across these profiles/containers.
Would really be great to move windows or tab groups between different profiles; Edge offers this. Sometimes you don't realize what profile you're in and you start doing stuff in your personal profile that doesn't fit there. With firefox right now there is no way to select and move any tabs, tab groups or windows to the profile that is best suited for those links.
It could be a privacy risk, though, because by directly moving a URL (and all its parameters) to another profile, it might be easy to link them together on the server side. It’s not necessarily a problem, but it’s definitely important to be aware of, since one of the main uses of profiles is precisely isolation for privacy and security.
For anyone as confused as I was, even if you're part of the rollout it will NOT migrate your old profiles. So this is nice and all, but completely useless to me until I can spend the time recreating my profiles on the new interface.
Is there a quick way to copy some bookmarks from one firefox profile to another? Drag and drop from bookmark library popup window (ctrl+shift+o) in profileA to equivalent window in profileB fails.
If you have the luxury, switch to different OS user accounts. mr_shopping for online buying, mr_games for games, .. mr_rascal for you know what. The attack surface isn't any different, but the blast radius might be.
Nice. I've been using Tab Groups Manager, and then Simple Tab Groups for years, but have also at times wished for more control and better separation while preserving ease of use (I really don't want to deal with providing CLI args). Hopefully this bridges the gap well.
Profiles rock. When I was WFH I had a work profile and a personal profile. Password manager synced across the two profiles, really slick experience honestly. I do wish you could change sync settings on a per-profile basis though.
You can change sync settings on a per-profile basis. I have 6 profiles, 4 of which I synchronize between different computers. They use different sync accounts. So for example on my personal profile I sync the passwords but not on the work profile.
Hmm. I turned on bookmark sync in one profile, and my bookmarks on all my profiles slowly merged together over the course of ~5 minutes. Very annoying.
After shutting down Firefox and restarting, I tried the new profile manager UI just now and also thought I had lost my existing profile. Luckily, it was still available from the hamburger menu (just below the “Synchronise all your devices” option) and I was able to switch back to it (with all my existing bookmarks, containers and extensions).
For me that's how it works unless I already have a Firefox window opened. If I have multiple windows of different profiles already open (which happens all the time) it may add it to the wrong one, so I sometimes need to drag and drop the tab between the windows.
Here is my wishlist with respect to browser profiles and containers. While the chances that I'll get them are low, I hope it inspires people to think bigger a bit more. It may be too hard on the current generation of web engines, but perhaps the next generation can plan better in advance.
We're doing profiles and containers wrong. There are numerous other free software that demonstrate better examples. Why do we have two solutions when both are about isolation of data and execution? Browsers should take inspiration from how the Linux kernel does it using namespaces (and similar facilities in other kernels, eg: BSD jails). Divide isolation into different contexts like the different types of namespaces. There should be different contexts for isolating:
- cookies policies and sharing
- local data
- extension availability and sharing
- network access (direct internet, proxy, VPN, TOR, etc)
- password stores
- lifetime (permanent, limited-time, single-use)
- web api availability (like no-js contexts, no-drm contexts, etc)
- browser features
- browsing history
- sync accounts
- bookmarks
- tab configuration and state
- theming
- ad block profiles
- website URL affinity (eg: don't open FB here, open YT only here, etc)
- resource allocations (like CPU, RAM, etc)
- redirection profiles (like to invidious, xitter, etc)
Different profiles/containers can be created by mixing and matching these isolation contexts. For example you can have two different profiles that sharing password managers, but one for use with VPN and one without. All the current uses of profiles and containers can be met with this concept - including private browsing. You could even have TOR browsing in the same browser. While at it, you could even simulate resource allocations like cgroups (already mentioned in the list).
All these might make you wonder if it isn't too complicated for ordinary people to use. Solutions for that exist in the OS space too. We have tools like docker, lxc and even bubblewrap to wrap over these low level complexities and present a simpler UI. In the browser, you could have different higher level plugins to setup profiles easily in specific manner. We can click 'private browsing' that will isolate a profile in every context by default (and offer to share anything else as it seems fit to you). You could have plugins that maintain different profiles for each of your gmail/workspace accounts. You could have a plugin that allows you to temporarily share OIDC SSO across profiles (currently an annoying problems with browser containers.) And finally, the power users may be able to script these low-level isolation contexts just the way they want it.
The next is how pages are displayed. Today we have full-window pages with multiple pages supported by tabs. But those who use browsers for anything serious, besides watching cat videos or doom scrolling on social media know how frustrating it is to not be able to browse two pages side-by-side. Some browsers like Zen do support that workflow, while others can get it using extensions. But we could go much further. Dividing windows is a solved problem that's very well done in applications like Blender, Emacs, VSCode and other IDEs. You should be able to divide the window into any arbitrary layout, with each pane (a subdivision of a window) showing one of the open pages. Emacs shows this with the concept of windows (which are panes) and buffers. Blender gives the same facility. The browser must be able to hold hundreds of such layouts along with their page assignments. To make it easy for the common user, these layouts can be presented as tabs to the user. Web pages should also be presented as a single-pane layout for that page, so that the user is able to close it easily without having to think about the distinction between a page, a tab and a pane like the way you need to know on Emacs.
Each page can be a different process with its own profile assignment and browsing history tree. The GUI should be a separate process. The amount of code shared between those processes should be based on security considerations. This way, we can have browser user profile, office profile, private browsing profile, developer profile and TOR profile all on the same window.
But the window layout shouldn't stop there. Currently, the menu bars, tab bar/sidebar, toolbars, address bar etc consume too much space. Imagine if it was the same case for desktops? Desktops take only a tiny fraction of the screen space in the form of the status bar or the dock. Even that is optional in many cases and can be hidden when not in use. The best way to layout the pages on a window IMHO, is how the tiling window managers do it. Browsers like Firefox already treat the UI like HTML+CSS. But it's on a different plane from the page UI - so much so that you need to start the debugger console in a different mode to control it. But if the tabs, status bars and menu bars used the same layout as regular pages (but with special UI control privileges), you'll get numerous options to design it the way you prefer and hide them easily.
To take it a bit further, I really like the concept of Wayland layer shells that allow you to make UI overlays. If you can make the controls into overlays, you could have per-pane controls like address bars and nav buttons that can be collapsed into small non-intrusive semitransparent UI buttons. This way, the UI can be truly full screen, easy to setup and easy to navigate.
I know that this is a tall order to achieve. But it costs nothing to dream, I guess.
> We're doing profiles and containers wrong. There are numerous other free software that demonstrate better examples.
Profiles are about separating Settings and user history, not for security isolation. If you want to do that use the OS?
> Today we have full-window pages with multiple pages supported by tabs. But those who use browsers for anything serious, besides watching cat videos or doom scrolling on social media know how frustrating it is to not be able to browse two pages side-by-side.
Why should the browser implement a window manager, when the window manager already exists? What stops you from putting two tabs side-by-side right now?
> But the window layout shouldn't stop there. Currently, the menu bars, tab bar/sidebar, toolbars, address bar etc consume too much space.
You know, that you can put the menubar into the OS panel?
> Profiles are about separating Settings and user history, not for security isolation.
Where does it say that? Using profiles is currently like using different browsers altogether. How does that preclude security isolation? All that aside, how did you reach the conclusion if you read what I wrote? I was talking about a single unified mechanism to consolidate the various types of isolations, security or not, in an easily understandablr manner. There are also some very annoying papercuts that I believe will be solved with that.
> If you want to do that use the OS?
> Why should the browser implement a window manager, when the window manager already exists?
If you haven't noticed, the browser has grown in the past quarter of a century into a full-fledged OS-level platform with a complex GUI, a few dozen technologies, equally numerous APIs, a decent sandbox and an entire VM to run applications written in any of a few dozen programming languages. It's easier to write a small OS compared to a small browser. Implementing window managers inside a browser is not very hard or unusual. Some browsers do it in their main UI too. I was suggesting an extension of that concept. If it can improve the UX of a browser, why insist on gatekeeping it to the OS window manager?
> What stops you from putting two tabs side-by-side right now?
Where have you ever seen that done satisfactorily? Forget the numerous bars and panels all over the place that take up so much space. When have you ever been able to share information seamlessly like in a single window? It's so frustrating that it's a joke as a solution.
> You know, that you can put the menubar into the OS panel?
On which platform? How many WMs/DEs you know offer that facility? Unlike on MacOS where you can do that, window managers have a few dozen menu bars that aren't even compatible with each other. How many OS panels will each browser have to integrate with? Here instead, I'm suggesting the use of a technology that's already there - the web engine. In fact, that's how most browsers implement their main UI already. But it's not quite well integrated with the engine, at least in Firefox. My suggestion was to remove that limitation. You're objecting to something that's already there.
If you need something to be upset about browsers, there are plenty of egregious changes being pushed down the throats of the users. In contrast, I wasn't suggesting anything that the user has to accept without questions. It's also something that can be done with the building blocks already available. In fact, the changes you object to are already being partially implemented by many projects and are well-received by users as far as I can see. If we are this cynical about trying out great ideas from other platforms, what sort of progress are we expecting anyway?
It's annoying these get grouped in the taskbar unlike Chrome profiles. Surely the main use case is to have a "Firefox" and a "Firefox (Work)" pinned separately to the taskbar and have them act as two completely different environments?
Curious, I've been running 2 profiles at once for a while on MacOS and they have separate icons / app management. It's a Windows thing.
A way you might get around this (if acceptable) is to run one profile from a beta or developer version of Firefox which has a separate app path & icon and may result in the behaviour you want.
Firefox profiles suck. Their UX is so bad. Containers are better but still have their issues. I use Containerise plus Cookie AutoDelete plus Temporary Containers to give me what is effectively per-tab private browsing. The major downside is that I have to copy containers.json (which enumerates all of the dedicated containers I have defined, e.g., for Facebook), my Containerise rules (which automatically puts certain web sites into specific containers), and my Cookie AutoDelete config (which says which cookies to delete and when) among browsers manually. I wish more things supported Firefox's sync feature. I ended up adding them to my dotfiles, so it isn't too painful, but it definitely isn't grandparent friendly.
That's what these changes aim to fix. You're getting a Chromium-like profile switcher/manager.
> Containers are better
Containers are very good... for container stuff. Profiles allow us to have different bookmarks, settings, extensions, themes, etc. Different tools for different jobs. I use both!
If you look at about:profiles and compare it to the new UI or to what Chromium has offered for years, then I think you'll understand that the new UI is much better for the average user. There are also improvements for operating systems like macOS, where profiles always worked, but switching between them wasn't exactly a nice experience.
You can still use the old profile manager. At the pace Mozilla moves, it will be there for years.
The old UI != about:profiles. I never knew about:profiles even existed for a long time, why I was already happy using the profiles UI for years. I mean the profiles UI, that pops up at startup.
> If you look at about:profiles and compare it to the new UI or to what Chromium has offered for years, then I think you'll understand that the new UI is much better for the average user.
No I think this looks way worse, than the native UI, they have had for decades and hope they don't remove the old UI, so it startup doesn't become slower and more annoying.
Profiles are great. I've used them for years. Much better than containers, which separate your data sort-of-but-not-quite. A profile folder has everything. You can copy it, back it up, plug it into a completely new Firefox installation later.
That portability is a killer feature, but scriptability needs to be improved. The manual says you can do:
>`firefox --profile <path> Start with profile at <path>`
But that will not work as expected if you have more than one profile (which is the whole point). At present the only workable solution is to fiddle with a GUI thru `about:profiles` (or `firefox --ProfileManager`) in order to create the profiles and give them all-important UIDs. And then do:
>`firefox -P <UID>`
It may seem small, but I've found that this is a serious roadblock. I wish it could be fixed so as to make profiles entirely scriptable.
PS: to be clear, after the futzing with the GUI to create the profiles, my script works (well!) at opening windows in the right profile, this way: (1) Check if the given profile is already launched: `ps -eo args | grep -E ".(firefox).(-P $UID)" | grep -v grep > /dev/null` (2) Do `firefox -P $UID --new-instance $url` if it isn't, and `--new-tab` if it is. Inelegant, but very reliable.
> Much better than containers, which separate your data sort-of-but-not-quite
What is better depends on the use case. For me, containers are magic, because I can be logged into eg 2-3 different microsoft accounts simultaneously in the same window. With profiles or other browsers I would need to open a different window for each, which would be unnecessary and impractical. This is extremely convenient for me, containers is the feature I cannot currently browse without. Sometimes "separate your data sort-of-but-not-quite" may be exactly what you may need.
This combined with "Always Open Site in Container", that pins a site to a specific container makes it almost invisible to me when moving between profiles.
I have several sites I only want to open with specific profiles and this workflow is a pain with Chrome. (click link with wrong profile, copy url, close tab, open a new browser, select profile, paste url, open site with correct profile.)
I really like the "Always Open Site in Container" along with "Limit to Designated Sites" once it's set up, but I wish there was a way to make it accept wildcards otherwise I have to manually add localhost:8080, localhost:8081, etc. Manually adding a dozen or more becomes painful.
Does the Containerise extension do what you want? I've used it in the past for wildcard subdomains but not for ports.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise/
I have come across that one, but not having the "trusted" badge in the extension store has usually been a hard pass for me. I might reconsider.
I find that for dev workflows (even outside firefox containers) to not mix up badly, you end up needing to split localhost anyway - so for example, binding to specific IPs inside 127.0.0.1/8 (it's a whole /8, you're usually not running out of that), or, depending on how badly you need ::1/IPv6 bindings, service.localhost6 or service.localhost6.localdomain6 style names instead of just localhost.
It’s so odd that there is no way to edit the list of sites manually. Now, the only way to ”Always Open Site in Container” is to first browse to that page. That’s not just inconvenient for batch edits, what’s worse is that you can end up in a redirection deadlock, with no chance to edit which container the first url should open in.
Agree, containers are exactly what I want and I use them all the time. Profiles are too much isolation, like installing separate VMs to run processes in a completely isolated way when something like Docker is fine.
The key element here is switching windows across profiles. Safari almost gets this right but fails in the UI imho. Edge has "workspaces" that could almost work but they don't provide isolation.
Zen [0] can bridge that gap. I have it set up so that each workspace in practice maps to a specific container.
[0] https://zen-browser.app/
Today is the day I no longer need to open a private browser to manage Entra. Thank you stranger, thank you very much
My biggest struggle with containers is that I constantly accidentally shift out of them without noticing. I never remember that the default "new tab" keyboard shortcut doesn't respect the current container.
In Windows 10 I have shortcuts pinned to my taskbar that are just
> ...firefox.exe" -P "profilename"
and then `taskbar.grouping.useprofile true` so only windows from the same profile are grouped together and some custom recolored Firefox icons for those pinned shortcuts and custom per-profile userChrome.css styling (#TabsToolbar background-color) for easy visual differentiation of a window's profile.
For Windows 10, no scripting is needed. Just the initial GUI profile setup.
> ...firefox.exe" -P "profilename" "https://www.example.com"
from terminal works exactly as expected regardless of how many profile instances are currently running or their state.
You can even have multiple versions of Firefox installed and point them at different profiles. I have some profiles on ESR and some on Standard.
Is there a command line flag that opens the url in a chromeless window for Firefox, so that it works like a PWA?
I haven't messed with Firefox's PWA feature/taskbar-tabs[1] but it seems like under the hood it's just using shortcuts so you're probably looking for -taskbar-tab
This redditor looks like he's doing close to what you're asking with the caveat of needing an entry in taskbartabs.json to use -taskbar-tab (and maybe Windows OS only) [2]
I don't think it's completely chromeless but you can probably hide everything via custom CSS:
ctrl+shift+i (dev tools) -> f1 (settings)
check advanced settings:
ctrl+shift+alt+i (browser dev tools)Find element IDs or class names and try out CSS rules to your heart's content.
Set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets = true and put your changes in Firefox/Profiles/$profilename/chrome/userChrome.css.
Remember to turn off the advanced settings when you're done.
[1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/t...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ljidwp/progressiv...
Cannot get this to work with Win11, whose taskbar won't accept the same program pinned twice. Even not, after creating two shortcuts.
For Win 10, I set this up a while ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy but the key was the `taskbar.grouping.useprofile true` setting. I think after that's set Firefox and Windows did some AUMID shenanigans on profile launch.
I just made a new profile as a test and this is what I did:
Normally I also renamed the pinned shortcut to something sane and then I changed the icon. I took the normal Firefox icon (I think w/ GIMP) and just messed with the colors via saturation or something so it was easy to tell the difference. I remember changing the shortcut icon had some headache but I sadly didn't write notes.Also, I didn't set grouping.useprofile on all my profiles, just the profiles I wanted separately pinned on my taskbar. My default profile is pinned normally without grouping.useprofile set.
Weird this works for Edge with two different profiles.
>from terminal [opening URLs in instances using profile paths] works exactly as expected regardless of how many profile instances are currently running or their state.
That's interesting. It didn't work a couple of years ago, perhaps it's been fixed.
Still leaves that initial GUI profile setup.
You don't need GUI to create profiles.
This is a good catch and does indeed work.
also works and will use the default profile path.Keep it mind, though, if you don't specify path, the profile directory name would be:
That could prove inconvenient for navigation.If you want predictable, non-random directory names, you'll have to specify it.
Useful. This is not documented in the manfile or command help text, at least for the ESR release.
I do this on Linux (Mint) and it works as expected.
Tried containers when it was released but found it very inconvenient to manage. If I understand this solution doesn't even let you have two profiles open at once? That's even less useful imho.
edit: I use Simple Tab Groups which is far more featureful - "Send tab to [group/container/etc]" for example is table stakes.
Of course you can have them open at once, that's what's useful. I have four! And I can open subsequent windows in the right profile, no problem. But it required non-trivial scripting.
I personnally went for extensions using them. I downloaded, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Youtube containers extensions.
I have had issues with Youtube and Google together. I think I solved it using the "Don't track me Google extension" but I am not so sure anymore
I have 3 different profiles, one for each of my current customers and one personal.
Within the customer profiles, I have containers for things like different AWS accounts (although AWS now has that as part of the console), I can have logins to test systems and production systems etc.
The automation of containers is good too, tied to URLs.
Have you tried `firefox --no-remote --profile <path>`?
In my case, I am able to launch several Firefox instances with distinct profiles.
Note that `--no-remote` breaks starting new browser windows from outside, which users normally want.
I'm starting to think that setting the `HOME` environment variable is the only way to really make things isolated - this still won't handle `~insertusernamehere` but basically everything else respects it.
--no-remote doesn't do anything anymore. It was removed about a year ago if memory serves.
I do `open -n "/Applications/Firefox.app" --args -p myprofilename` and that does the trick on mac
On windows powershell I do Start-Process "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -ArgumentList "-P default-release" Which is the exact same idea.
Yes, I tried that and everything else. Either it refuses to launch with `--new-instance` or (from memory, in the case of your command) subsequent `--new-tab`s may open in the wrong profile. Presumably due to the order in which the original instances were created. The point is that the system turns on these UIDs, which are not paths or even hashes of paths.
Another roadblock that I've encountered is moving a tab between profiles. For a multitude of reasons, foremost between them research, I would often come across a tab that I know would be useful for one of my other research subjects. If the profile in question is closed, there is too much friction to open it, copy the url, paste into a new tab, then close the profile again.
A single "Send to profile" option would be such a boon to productivity.
> A profile folder has everything. You can copy it, back it up, plug it into a completely new Firefox installation later.
These new profiles seem to be slightly different from the old ones?
[edit: ignore most of the stuff below, see replies]
The new UI doesn't show your other regular profiles and when you create a new profile via the new UI, it also doesn't create a separate profile folder (it's part of your active profile). They're like sub profiles... probably to allow everything to be synced via a Firefox account?
We can still move the profile folder. The difference is that what's created with the new UI is part of that folder (the old about:profiles page is still there and old style profiles are still supported).
It still creates separate folders but you're right that about:profiles seems to treat them as the same.
When you open about:profiles in both your "new" profiles, you can see that even though it has the same name, the path changes.
So I think in effect they still behave like profiles before, just with some extra logic on top so they have names, icons and so on.
You're right. For some reason I couldn't see the folders being created, but after restarting Firefox (about:profiles required me to do after creating profiles with the new UI), they are created.
Do you know if there's any way to have old profiles showing on this new UI?
Edit: They seem to be working on this:
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1996240
- https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D270525
Tip: Use --no-remote to run a second instance of Firefox with a separate profile.
Otherwise it tends to just spawn a new window in the existing instance.
> But that will not work as expected if you have more than one profile (which is the whole point). At present the only workable solution is to fiddle with a GUI thru `about:profiles` (or `firefox --ProfileManager`) in order to create the profiles and give them all-important UIDs.
FWIW, that's only true if you care about it having those IDs and being exposed to the graphical interface. If you don't, then you can just run `firefox --profile $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/whatever` and it works. I use a small shell script™ wrapper to run firefox this way and it's quite nice. Also helpful: If you run firefox like that, you can just point it at a new empty directory and it'll populate it as a profile, so it's easy to make new ones too.
But that script won't work if you need to open subsequent new windows in particular profiles.
PS: probably. It's possible there was a fix. The GUI setup remains unscriptable.
Ah, right. TBH I mostly just don't do that, but I did throw together a script that takes a URL and just puts it on the clipboard and uses notify-send to tell you about it, so I can just paste into whichever window I want (and then tell the system that that script is my preferred "browser" to open http(s) URLs). This obviously adds a little friction, but it makes it trivial to open links in any browser/profile/window/tab-group I want.
> The manual says you can do:
>>`firefox --profile <path> Start with profile at <path>`
>But that will not work as expected if you have more than one profile (which is the whole point).
What won't work? Is that specific to Windows? This just works fine on my Linux box.
Yessss, I've been wondering how to script different FF profiles (just haven't had enough time/motivation). That was the only thing holding me back from making it my daily driver.
A roadblock to what workflow? I just have -p in my firefox shortcut and it shows the profile manager every time I launch. I have 6 profiles I use regularly.
Unfortunately I don't think you can just transfer willy nilly between firefox versions, at a certain point downgrades don't work, and I'm just trying to figure out where that point is (can you move to ESR for example)
My script uses `firefox-esr --allow-downgrade` for exactly that reason. It worked in my case.
The most useful feature with the worst UX. You have to type about:profiles and then create a new profile. But imagin you now want to move old profiles to a new computer and FF happens to run in a Flatpack. Yeah, much fun
You can (now?) create profiles from the account icon in the toolbar [1] and at least on my firefox install, you can also do it from the hamburger menu.
I use firefox via flatpak and had no issues so far accessing profile data (in one of the folders in ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/firefox/ - I keep a regular archive of the entire folder as backup).
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management
Maybe it hasn't been rolled out to me yet. Or it might be because I'm not logged into a Firefox profile? It is only availiable to those logged in?
No I don't use sync at all. I think it might just require `browser.profiles.enabled` to be set to true in about:config, at least until wider rollout.
> Not all users will see the new Profiles menu in the toolbar, since this feature is being rolled out gradually
I don't see it yet, but hopefully soon.
You could use the about:config preference browser.profiles.enabled in the meantime I suppose.
I don't have it on 144.0.2 on mac in either of those places, just as a datapoint
I'm on 144.0.2 on MacOS and I do have it. Under the hamburger menu in the upper right and near the top of the list. Never set up a profile on this machine before, so maybe that could be related?
I found out about profiles recently and I just couldn't believe that that's the standard way to access them. Also, it's not obvious which profile you are currently on, so there are some silly but necessary workarounds like having a dummy bookmark with the profile name on each or something like that, while it could just be a string next to the address bar.
It works really well though. Does exactly what I would expect and hope from such a feature.
I have different coloured themes for my profiles. Simple and immediate.
there's an old '-P' flag that shows a small ui
see https://imgur.com/a/Tmt3oEL
Huh, I had no idea the <profile> argument to -P is optional (--help does not say), I was always using --ProfileManager instead. Nice quality of life improvement, thanks for the information!
ah well, ironically I had no idea that -P could take a profile-name arg.. I always used it without to trigger the gui .. so I return the thanks
Does it still work?
yes. I just started using it last week to split work related browsing from personal stuff.
That used to be a start menu entry in the old days. I had heard it was removed but to my surprise -P works on my current linux. I'll have to see if it does actually start a new profile.
Use -p in your shortcut to firefox and it will show the profile manager on launch, from that you can easily create a new profile or open a new window on existing one.
cli is not good ux
for the most part I've been using Firefox containers and loving that life of getting the same benefits without having to create separate profiles.
but it's nice to see this finally get into Firefox because there are still a lot of folks who also want to maintain things like browser bookmarks, passwords etc in a separate profile. that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers (which IMHO is slightly better than having to manage multiple profiles)
> that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers
But thats a massive difference.
I have work profiles and a personal profile. I have password manager profiles for clients (clients will provide their own PM logins to segregate their access) which are different between them, and having separate profiles is huge.
Containers are great, especially for crappy websites that use your sessions for tracking which page you are on, but they are no where near powerful enough.
You've hit on the relevant distinction: user context vs system context.
I use containers to separate system context (partitioning cookies and site data) while remaining in the same user context (e.g. "personal browsing").
I use profiles for when I need different user contexts (different bookmarks and frequently used sites for different clients or projects).
When only one tool is available, you are limited by the constraints of that tool (e.g. bookmarks bleeding over between user contexts when using containers, or having to copy extensions or bookmarks into every profile).
> I use profiles for when I need different user contexts (different bookmarks and frequently used sites for different clients or projects).
This is the part where the new Firefox profiles fall short. I just checked and cannot create two separate profiles with the same email address. So it's not possible tohave different profiles for different _projects_ at work, for example.
Containers are the way to go with this, but then they are not exactly intuitive. Arc got this right and Zen is showing a lot of promise.
I like to have it both ways. Given the options available so far I've preferred to have bookmarks shared between both and mainly keep tabs / working context separate.
The best I've managed so far is to run separate instances of Firefox with the same Sync Account which appear as separate 'devices'. Nightly with a different icon and theme makes it obvious which is which.
This way if I come across something interesting I want dig into further on my own time, I can bookmark it as well as 'Send Tab To Device -> Home' or 'Phone' depending on where I want to be and what environment I want to have available when I see it later (e.g. read only, or hands on).
Yes, I may be hoarding a lot of tabs but that's a separate issue...
Cookies can already be partitioned. I am not sure if it's default but at the very least it's a config flag. It's called site isolation. I have seen Firefox people say containers kind of become unnecessary with this in place in terms of privacy but they kind of have an opaque whitelist to get some things to work. The biggest example is google properties.
that's fair (and glad profiles have finally arrived in FF for that reason); personally, i don't use password managers linked to any specific browser but i can understand your use case.
> and glad profiles have finally arrived in FF for that reason
Profiles have been there for years, been using them since at least 2010.
> that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers
Actually, I have wanted better profile support for a while to segregate addons. There are plenty of addons that I want to use occasionally that require full data access. I generally do trust them, but even so, I keep these in a separate profile just in case. That is something that can't be done with containers.
> There are plenty of addons that I want to use occasionally that require full data access. I generally do trust them...
Seconded, except I don't trust most add-ons and don't want to have to trust them.
I want an easy way to launch a disposable browser session in any browser, totally isolated, with add-ons chosen (and downloaded) at launch time, and then erased of with the rest of the session when its last open page is closed.
I think Firefox focus does that on android, I'm sure there's a way to get the same result on a desktop with some flags and pointing to a config file (or a read only profile folder maybe?)
AFAIK Firefox Focus doesn't have extensions at all:( Although yes, it effectively has only private/incognito sessions that are erased when you close the app.
Profiles were in Firefox for a long time now. It looks like they finally have made a proper UI for it.
What's wrong with the existing ProfileManager?
Beyond its UI having basically been frozen since Netscape Navigator 4-ish modulo XUL shenanigans?
The new Profile Manager (that doesn't yet entirely replace the old one, both exist side-by-side for the moment) uses icons and colors to better differentiate profiles at a glance.
Additionally links to the new Profile Manager are now in the Account menu and feel a bit more like an "account chooser" (comparable to Chrome's experience, especially) and lot less like a power user feature hidden behind a page address that people might not know ("about:profiles").
> that doesn't yet entirely replace the old one
That's what I fear happening, and I will not like it.
> comparable to Chrome's experience
If I wanted to have "Chrome's experience" I would have used Chrome. Profiles is one way Firefox has been vastly better. Selecting the last used Profile is one press on Enter on startup and selecting a different one is a matter of pressing up/down a few times and pressing Enter or typing the first few (unique) characters of the profile name and pressing Enter. I can't think of a UI that would be faster, I think this has already reached the maximum UX for decades. This all works nicely, because it looks, feels and behaves like a native window (don't know if it is).
> lot less like a power user feature hidden behind a page address that people might not know ("about:profiles").
Why is everyone comparing it to the "hidden debug site" instead of the old profiles UI? Yeah no shit, about:profiles is not discoverable to the average user, much like all the other about: pages, but why would anyone not debugging the browser use it over the normal profiles UI?
> Beyond its UI having basically been frozen since Netscape Navigator 4-ish modulo XUL shenanigans?
I don't think this is a bad thing. I vastly prefer native(?-like) UI, way more over yet another Metro-UI clone with sluggish behaviour and no keyboard bindings.
Wanted this for years, and was one of the blockers that made Firefox impossible to really use. It looks like they're copying Chromium's UI (which is good, since it was superior to Firefox's about:profiles, for reasons others have mentioned).
But neither this post, nor the splash screen which links to this, nor any of the menu options, actually say how to use "profiles". I can't find it in an internet search either, instead coming up with Firefox's old about:profiles solution. Nor is it enabled using the little user icon in the browser bar, nor is it activated with the same shortcut as Chromium profiles.
I eventually found it in their knowledge base, and it appears to be locked behind a sign in button under the profile icon? Or my (up to date) browser lacks the button? This is such a confusing experience.
What do you mean? Firefox has had profiles for decades. What is wrong with the Profile Manager?
The user experience was abysmal, it was practically a non-feature. Can't be invoked quickly using two keyboard shortcuts, does not divide into simple and portable folders, etc.
This update seems to fix those problems, by copying Chromium's UX.
> The user experience was abysmal, it was practically a non-feature.
I disagree. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45844108
> Can't be invoked quickly using two keyboard shortcuts
Yeah true, you have to instead click on the Firefox logo or type Firefox into the application launcher.
> does not divide into simple and portable folders
I have used the same profile folder over SSH across Linux and Windows, so I don't think that's true.
Some folks under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45829275 seem to say that there's an about:config to force enable it, or you could wait for it to get rolled out to you.
Here it is for anyone else who struggled:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management
I've been using Firefox profiles for years, never had an issue with them, the UI, or how to access the functionality. Sure it wasn't immediately easy to find and use but I never really got a lot of the criticism. Coloured themes (which them seem to be integrating) was an easy way to differentiate the profile I was using, especially when I had multiple open at once.
Glad it's getting an update, hope it doesn't ruin a decent feature.
The confusing part of this is there are now two distinct kinds of profiles: the old profiles that you create through about:profiles and the new profiles that you create in this profile switcher, which appear to be nested within the old profile
They should make it a bit more clear they added features that were not there before and what, as it is not clear to me what has changed from before that I tried using them. Apparently it seems better now, but no wonder most commenters do not realise this is about some new features not about the old.
What’s new now? Just the UI for picking profiles? The article contains absolutely no details.
The article links to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management. From my memory of how profiles worked previously it's mostly a fresh coat of paint for things you could do before.
The two most exciting things to me:
1. You can now launch and manage profiles from a menu hidden in the account menu (feels like the wrong place to put it, but shows up for me even though I'm not signed in)
2. Mozilla actually cares about profiles again. The feature felt mostly abandoned before, nearly inaccessible without command line flags or the very bare-bones and ugly about:profiles
Still difficult to tell for me. I enabled `browser.profiles.enabled` and now there's Profiles in the hamburger menu. However, it only shows a default profile. It does not show any other existing profiles.
Yeah, that is exactly the problem.
So far I see that it is easier to create/open/swap between different profiles (before the easiest way was literally the terminal). There is a small icon next to firefox dock icon on macos for each profile that you can choose, which I do not remember before. So you can easily distinguish which icon corresponds to which profile window. And that you can edit the theme for each profile easier.
I'm happy this is getting a new UI. Always been a pain to use compared to Chrome profiles.
Profiles WITH container tabs is pretty killer, dont' think Chrome has anything like this.
I wish I could open another profile in one click and/or one hotkey.I have two profiles (pro and personal) and it isn't possible to open the other with a keyboard shortcut. It's also 3-clicks minimum. Not the best UX they could do…
Why'd you use profiles and containers together?
Profiles for the typical Work/Personal separation with their own bookmarks, extensions, password manager accounts etc……
Then I use containers for isolating sensitive accounts within those profiles (bank, work Google Drive, etc).
I also use temporary containers to make it easier to be logged into the same site with multiple accounts at the same time between tabs - like admin and user accounts for our company’s app - which also make it easier to clear sessions and data.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
The growing consensus seems to be: containers are what services you want to separate from each other (cross-service tracking cookies, etc) and profiles are what services you want to separate for yourself (workflows/projects/work versus fun, etc).
So… what's changing? Profiles have been there for decade(s), is it just an alternative UI for folks who were unable to run firefox -p, or is there anything more substantial?
What a shocker right? I guess everyday normal people do dot use a command prompt much less open a terminal to open a browser profile.
They like to click and icon and create/switch profile. Chrome, edge and many other browsers had this feature for ever. Not having ability to easily switch profiles is only reason I did not switch to Firefox full time even though I quite like the multi containers extension in Firefox for managing bazillion AWS accounts.
It's actually astonishing that it took mozilla folks the guts of 20 years to get around to this glaring UX gap.
Command prompt, terminal? What are you talking about?
You just have to add the -p in the shortcut properties.
Seems that there's no news. But it's great opportunity for profile users to exchange tips and gripe about missing features.
Came here to ask the same question. Maybe the news is there's now an easy way to theme them?
I've been using this hack for a while now: Firefox developer edition as my "work" profile and the regular Firefox for personal browsing.
I'd been doing that somewhat too, but also a mix of the old -ProfileManager. The new UI is shiny enough I may consider consolidating to just one Edition, though I haven't decided which Edition yet.
(Fun fact, you can even switch to the Developer Edition default profile from regular Firefox with the -ProfileManager though that is not generally a good idea because Developer Edition is intentionally a half-step version or two ahead of "retail" Firefox. Developer Edition assumes you don't mind being a little bit closer to the bleeding edge. Still not the same as using Firefox Nightly as your daily driver, but still often a "power user preview" version.)
Finally. I know that profiles have been supported for a long time, but about:profiles wasn't that user friendly and on macOS, profiles could also mess your dock icon, wouldn't open in the foreground, etc. It wasn't a good experience.
I think the new profiles will cause some confusion (at least initially) because these profiles are not listed on the old about:profiles page and the old profiles are not listed on the new UI.
Still, a good improvement for me. I no longer need to use the dev/nightly channels or 3rd party browsers based on FF just to have different bookmarks/settings/extensions. I'll need a way to add old profiles to the new UI though.
Forget about UI, just use CLI
Create a separate icon for each profile and forget about:profiles interface.Disclaimer: I don't use macOS, but I'm sure it's similar to Linux in that regard. You'll need to change paths, of course.
That's great for part of HN users, just not for most Firefox users. I guess that's they already had the old interface and are making it more user friendly with the new UI :-)
Firefox profiles have worked really well for me for years. I only have two complaints. (a) I like to configure my tools, and setting prefs via user.js has just never really worked - anything there is ignored. Probably it's just because of my particular setup, but I eventually gave up on it. (b) It would be super nice if profiles could [edit:] share common prefs. I certainly don't expect the developers to make it a feature, and it seems like fixing (a) and using symlinks would do it. But overall, yeah profiles work great.
The point of profiles is that they are completely isolated from each other, like separate installs, so I don't think starting to share preferences would be great.
> "if profiles could common prefs"
sorry I couldn't quite parse this
What an extremely confusing blog post! I don't understand why it seemingly presents profiles as a new feature? Firefox has had profiles for years. What the heck is new?
I had to click the other link https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management to understand that this is all about simple UI improvements to make it easier to work with existing profiles.
The blog post is more than confusing, it is misleading. HN should link to the support page instead of the blog post.
100% agree. It feels like Firefox has had an identical announcement of this as a new feature every second major release for the last ~2 years.
They are seriously dropping the ball here in terms of communication and it just makes Firefox seem stale.
> Firefox has had profiles for years. What the heck is new?
Even further back — Netscape had profiles! https://web.archive.org/web/20000816175642/http://help.netsc...
It looks like AI slop to me. "Profiles in Firefox aren’t just a way to clean up your tabs. They’re a way to set boundaries, protect your information and make the internet a little calmer." - classic meaningless comparison.
If it's buried in about:config, it's not a feature, it's just a dev tool. (FWIW, I read that config settings may reset during updates, so at best it's just a temporary patch.)
It's like saying you have a responsive website, but only if I edit the layout in the DOM.
Nit: It's not a parameter in about:config, it's been available for a while under about:profiles, no tweak needed
And now they're rolling out a new UI for it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management
I've been using profiles for 15 years and I didn't even know it was in about:config.
Just add -p in your shortcut to start on the profile manager.
No, you use it in the ProfileManager, which is a GUI that pops up on start.
For some reason neither my Dark Mode add-on nor the built in reader mode (which also makes pages dark as I prefer) work on that page. Very annoying; will skip reading that to preserve my eyes.
Glad to see improvements here -- switching between profiles has always been a weak spot for Firefox!
I don't understand some of these comments. Start firefox, pick profile, opens a window in the selected profile.
The only weirdness is when you have multiple windows of different profiles opened at the same time and you open a link from a different application it may open it in the last used window which may not be the one you wanted. But then you can of course just drag and drop the tab from one window to the other.
You don't need to switch. Just open whatever profile you want directly.
No need to go to about:profiles. Use a separate shortcut with a -profile option added.
I use containers in Firefox and have good to semi good experience. Will try this out. My main issue with containers so far is SSO. I have some things like GitHub etc I like to keep in my coding container. Then domains that only belong to work. But my company uses SSO in GitHub. It makes the usage really awkward. Start in GitHub container, login jumps to Work container and links back to GitHub container and fails since the cookies created by the login container are not set. But to separate shopping and finance related things it works great. But I will give this a go since I have finally a harder separation between work and private usage of my coding and ai usage etc.
Does this read like AI slop to anyone else?
That whole "Profiles don't/aren't just $THIS; they're also $THAT" construction is classic LLM output. Then you've got the weird confusing inconsistencies like calling profiles a new feature when they aren't and there's also the rule of 3 ("avatars, colours, naming", "set boundaries, protect your information and make the internet a little calmer"). It all feels machine-written. Even the comparison of tidying your tabs to setting boundaries seems meaningless. It's just the sort of empty parallels AI loves to make.
It's a short article but I really had to power through it because with every sentence I kept thinking, this is not written by a human. If it is AI-generated slop, that'd explain why some parts of it doesn't make any sense.
> $THING isn't just $THIS, it's also $THAT!
Is pure marketing speak, which is also what I find a lot of LLM generated text sounds like
Someone in a past thread here mentioned how they enjoyed the help of LLMs to generate all their PR marketing nonsense blurbs, because they looked just as good as the real thing. It might have been 2-3 years ago but I still joke about this with coworkers when the conversations shift to "AI".
An idea we'll have to start getting used to is that people who read enough of the slop might begin to emulate it without necessarily meaning to. The homogeneity will be contagious.
I still don't quite understand where ChatGPT and its pals learned this. Sure, all these PR copywriters are notoriously bad at writing, but still, I don't think I often met all this crap in many texts before. I mean, if I did, I wouldn't be noticing it now as that ChatGPT style. So why does it write like that? Is it even how Anthropic models write as well (never used them)? Is it some OpenAI RL artifact, or is it something deeper, something about the language itself?
I cannot even always quite formulate, what irks me about its output so much. Except for that "it's not X, it's Y" pattern. For non-English it may be easier, because it really just cannot use idioms properly, it's super irritating. But I wouldn't say it doesn't know English. Yet it somehow always manages to write in uncannily bad style.
Looks like you are much worse at understanding writing than you think.
Contrasting, rule of three, etc. are basic writing techniques that are common among good writers because they are good. This is the reason why AI learned to use them - because they work very well in communication.
I think the idiom by itself is good, and that could be the reason why LLMs prefer it: a hypothetical test groups liked it.
The problem comes from that LLM prefers it way too often.
And I suppose it would be a bit difficult to change it to actually be good: even if it just used it once per session, it might still choose to use it on every session, as it cannot see how much an idiom has been used in other ones.
New feature blablabla... Hey, Mozilla - how about fixing the multiyear old bug, which has like several dozen tickets in bugzilla alone, about randomly losing all open tabs? What good are profiles to me, if one of most important of the secondary features of a browser is fundamentally broken and unreliable? I'm so pissed at Mozilla for their attitude (nothing new really, after the Ugly Bar update and those comments on reddit). If there was a real third browser on Windows I would have jumped ship, despite running FF since beta, both on PC and mobile. Just last month FF managed to kill all my open tabs a third time this year, and that's after no error, completely normal PC shutdown and boot next day. (ps: I know about scrounger)
I just enabled it via about:config with the option browser.profiles.enabled, but it didn't show my existing profiles that appear on about:profiles.
You cannot see the old profiles using the new UI for profiles.
Profiles have always been great, but it's kind of unfortunate that this feature seems to be locked behind a sign-in (the link in the article describes the UI as being in the profile menu).
I mean, I've been using about:profiles for ages, but it would definitely be nice to have a bit more polish (e.g. every now and again I forget that a newly created profile is automatically promoted to default)
[edit] well seems I have to eat my words - there's a switch in about:config named "browser.profiles.enabled" that toggles a profiles menu item with some UI that apparently has existed for years. Nice!
Nice to know about that. Odd that it doesn't list any of my existing profiles though
You're right, it seems both the UI and the old about:profiles page do use the same underlying implementation, but the UI does not pick up any profiles added through the about: page. If you create a new profile from the UI, that will show up in about (after a restart).
It blows my mind.
I can't have profile without having a "Sign In" button in my toolbar. Mozilla… please. How is it possible, to ship a feature and do that…
Been using profiles for some years now and they are great. I usually start with the default profile, then navigate to "about:profiles" to open all I need. Thanks to profiles, when my manjaro install broke, I migrated to NixOS and all my browsing sessions were ready to use the way I left them. Getting a dedicated, more integrated UI for managing profile will be great.
The one thing I'm missing is "incognito" profiles - e.g. spawn a temporary profile (without any identity attached) easily when I'm researching/navigating unusual sites and kill it once I'm done. Having multiple of these would be a great improvement over normal incognito windows (which share identities).
> I usually start with the default profile, then navigate to "about:profiles" to open all I need.
Just add -p in the shortcut properties to start on the profile manager.
I've used profiles for a long time, but they have some annoyances.
One thing I really want is a comprehensive system for transferring/syncing only certain data between profiles. Profiles contain some data that is specific to, well, a particular browsing profile (like open tabs), but also data that is really more specific to me as a person (like font preferences). And then each extension can have its own settings or data that I may or may not want to transfer. I always have to look up old articles on Mozilla wiki and hope they're still accurate when I want to transfer certain data/settings between profiles while neither nuking everything nor copying everything. It would be great to have a sort of "data browser" that let me pick and choose certain data and then create a new profile from that.
The other disappointing thing to me is how they talk about profiles (and container tabs) as related to different usage patterns like work, home, etc. I mean, yeah, that's cool, but what I really want (certainly from container tabs, sometimes from profiles as well) is site isolation. I don't just want one profile for my work Gmail and another for my personal Gmail. I want one container tab for "everything Google", isolated from the rest, to minimize Google's tracking. But, like I said above, I still want all my personal preferences uniform across these profiles/containers.
Have you tried user.js?
You store browser preferences in it and firefox copies said preferences to prefs.js on startup (overwriting on conflict).
Would really be great to move windows or tab groups between different profiles; Edge offers this. Sometimes you don't realize what profile you're in and you start doing stuff in your personal profile that doesn't fit there. With firefox right now there is no way to select and move any tabs, tab groups or windows to the profile that is best suited for those links.
I do it all the time I'm not sure what you are talking about.
I use Tree Style Tabs extension (obviously), so maybe the feature is coming from there?
You can definitely drag and drop a tab from one window to another, target window can be in a different profile.
You can select multiple tabs with SHIFT and then drag and drop them to the other window, no problem.
It could be a privacy risk, though, because by directly moving a URL (and all its parameters) to another profile, it might be easy to link them together on the server side. It’s not necessarily a problem, but it’s definitely important to be aware of, since one of the main uses of profiles is precisely isolation for privacy and security.
Does Edge do any more then open the same URL in another profile? In that case you can do this in Firefox by drag-and-dropping the URL.
Not even drag and drop to the window with a different profile?
For anyone as confused as I was, even if you're part of the rollout it will NOT migrate your old profiles. So this is nice and all, but completely useless to me until I can spend the time recreating my profiles on the new interface.
Seriously, what the hell Mozilla?
I presume they counted on the fact that almost nobody actually used the old (extremely obscure) profile system.
I hope that they will not remove old UI for profiles and do not decide to show old profiles in new UI.
Is there a quick way to copy some bookmarks from one firefox profile to another? Drag and drop from bookmark library popup window (ctrl+shift+o) in profileA to equivalent window in profileB fails.
How does that differ from the existing profiles? Firefox has had profiles for decades.
This is introducing a friendlier profile management GUI for non-power-users, I believe.
What is the problem with the current ProfileManager?
the new profile UI will not show you the old ones!
Sounds like a problem with the new UI, rather than the old. Will the old show profiles created in the new UI?
no
So when they remove the old UI, all my profiles will be gone?
If you have the luxury, switch to different OS user accounts. mr_shopping for online buying, mr_games for games, .. mr_rascal for you know what. The attack surface isn't any different, but the blast radius might be.
At this point better going directly with Qubes OS, where each program is a separated VM, no?
I've got Firefox 144.2 on Android; are profiles available there? If so, how does one use them?
No, it's not available for Android or iOS:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management#w_is...
Nice. I've been using Tab Groups Manager, and then Simple Tab Groups for years, but have also at times wished for more control and better separation while preserving ease of use (I really don't want to deal with providing CLI args). Hopefully this bridges the gap well.
Profiles rock. When I was WFH I had a work profile and a personal profile. Password manager synced across the two profiles, really slick experience honestly. I do wish you could change sync settings on a per-profile basis though.
You can change sync settings on a per-profile basis. I have 6 profiles, 4 of which I synchronize between different computers. They use different sync accounts. So for example on my personal profile I sync the passwords but not on the work profile.
Hmm. I turned on bookmark sync in one profile, and my bookmarks on all my profiles slowly merged together over the course of ~5 minutes. Very annoying.
I enabled this last night and it deleted my existing profile, fwiw.
Both bookmarks that I'd just created and, just to clarify I'm not losing my mind, the full profile because I had to reinstall ublock origin.
After shutting down Firefox and restarting, I tried the new profile manager UI just now and also thought I had lost my existing profile. Luckily, it was still available from the hamburger menu (just below the “Synchronise all your devices” option) and I was able to switch back to it (with all my existing bookmarks, containers and extensions).
I'm glad you found yours, but mine was gone. I went spelunking through the profiles directory and it was nowhere to be found.
I had to pull it from backups.
Ah. Sorry to hear that. That's very annoying frustrating but I'm glad you were able to restore from backup.
I found it confusing that there are now two different sets of profiles and had panicked at first when my original profile was apparently gone.
For a second, I thought it's for https://profiler.firefox.com
So, can I make it that when I click a URL in another program, Firefox would ask me which profile to use?
For me that's how it works unless I already have a Firefox window opened. If I have multiple windows of different profiles already open (which happens all the time) it may add it to the wrong one, so I sometimes need to drag and drop the tab between the windows.
That's ... the current behaviour? At least on Debian Firefox ESR 115, and also on all versions I remember to have used.
I'm curious about that too. Currently it just uses the default one.
A profile for each site you visit by default please
Profiles isolate settings, bookmarks, history, etc.
It’s not feasible to isolate these “per site”.
Here is my wishlist with respect to browser profiles and containers. While the chances that I'll get them are low, I hope it inspires people to think bigger a bit more. It may be too hard on the current generation of web engines, but perhaps the next generation can plan better in advance.
We're doing profiles and containers wrong. There are numerous other free software that demonstrate better examples. Why do we have two solutions when both are about isolation of data and execution? Browsers should take inspiration from how the Linux kernel does it using namespaces (and similar facilities in other kernels, eg: BSD jails). Divide isolation into different contexts like the different types of namespaces. There should be different contexts for isolating: - cookies policies and sharing - local data - extension availability and sharing - network access (direct internet, proxy, VPN, TOR, etc) - password stores - lifetime (permanent, limited-time, single-use) - web api availability (like no-js contexts, no-drm contexts, etc) - browser features - browsing history - sync accounts - bookmarks - tab configuration and state - theming - ad block profiles - website URL affinity (eg: don't open FB here, open YT only here, etc) - resource allocations (like CPU, RAM, etc) - redirection profiles (like to invidious, xitter, etc)
Different profiles/containers can be created by mixing and matching these isolation contexts. For example you can have two different profiles that sharing password managers, but one for use with VPN and one without. All the current uses of profiles and containers can be met with this concept - including private browsing. You could even have TOR browsing in the same browser. While at it, you could even simulate resource allocations like cgroups (already mentioned in the list).
All these might make you wonder if it isn't too complicated for ordinary people to use. Solutions for that exist in the OS space too. We have tools like docker, lxc and even bubblewrap to wrap over these low level complexities and present a simpler UI. In the browser, you could have different higher level plugins to setup profiles easily in specific manner. We can click 'private browsing' that will isolate a profile in every context by default (and offer to share anything else as it seems fit to you). You could have plugins that maintain different profiles for each of your gmail/workspace accounts. You could have a plugin that allows you to temporarily share OIDC SSO across profiles (currently an annoying problems with browser containers.) And finally, the power users may be able to script these low-level isolation contexts just the way they want it.
The next is how pages are displayed. Today we have full-window pages with multiple pages supported by tabs. But those who use browsers for anything serious, besides watching cat videos or doom scrolling on social media know how frustrating it is to not be able to browse two pages side-by-side. Some browsers like Zen do support that workflow, while others can get it using extensions. But we could go much further. Dividing windows is a solved problem that's very well done in applications like Blender, Emacs, VSCode and other IDEs. You should be able to divide the window into any arbitrary layout, with each pane (a subdivision of a window) showing one of the open pages. Emacs shows this with the concept of windows (which are panes) and buffers. Blender gives the same facility. The browser must be able to hold hundreds of such layouts along with their page assignments. To make it easy for the common user, these layouts can be presented as tabs to the user. Web pages should also be presented as a single-pane layout for that page, so that the user is able to close it easily without having to think about the distinction between a page, a tab and a pane like the way you need to know on Emacs.
Each page can be a different process with its own profile assignment and browsing history tree. The GUI should be a separate process. The amount of code shared between those processes should be based on security considerations. This way, we can have browser user profile, office profile, private browsing profile, developer profile and TOR profile all on the same window.
But the window layout shouldn't stop there. Currently, the menu bars, tab bar/sidebar, toolbars, address bar etc consume too much space. Imagine if it was the same case for desktops? Desktops take only a tiny fraction of the screen space in the form of the status bar or the dock. Even that is optional in many cases and can be hidden when not in use. The best way to layout the pages on a window IMHO, is how the tiling window managers do it. Browsers like Firefox already treat the UI like HTML+CSS. But it's on a different plane from the page UI - so much so that you need to start the debugger console in a different mode to control it. But if the tabs, status bars and menu bars used the same layout as regular pages (but with special UI control privileges), you'll get numerous options to design it the way you prefer and hide them easily.
To take it a bit further, I really like the concept of Wayland layer shells that allow you to make UI overlays. If you can make the controls into overlays, you could have per-pane controls like address bars and nav buttons that can be collapsed into small non-intrusive semitransparent UI buttons. This way, the UI can be truly full screen, easy to setup and easy to navigate.
I know that this is a tall order to achieve. But it costs nothing to dream, I guess.
> We're doing profiles and containers wrong. There are numerous other free software that demonstrate better examples.
Profiles are about separating Settings and user history, not for security isolation. If you want to do that use the OS?
> Today we have full-window pages with multiple pages supported by tabs. But those who use browsers for anything serious, besides watching cat videos or doom scrolling on social media know how frustrating it is to not be able to browse two pages side-by-side.
Why should the browser implement a window manager, when the window manager already exists? What stops you from putting two tabs side-by-side right now?
> But the window layout shouldn't stop there. Currently, the menu bars, tab bar/sidebar, toolbars, address bar etc consume too much space.
You know, that you can put the menubar into the OS panel?
> Profiles are about separating Settings and user history, not for security isolation.
Where does it say that? Using profiles is currently like using different browsers altogether. How does that preclude security isolation? All that aside, how did you reach the conclusion if you read what I wrote? I was talking about a single unified mechanism to consolidate the various types of isolations, security or not, in an easily understandablr manner. There are also some very annoying papercuts that I believe will be solved with that.
> If you want to do that use the OS?
> Why should the browser implement a window manager, when the window manager already exists?
If you haven't noticed, the browser has grown in the past quarter of a century into a full-fledged OS-level platform with a complex GUI, a few dozen technologies, equally numerous APIs, a decent sandbox and an entire VM to run applications written in any of a few dozen programming languages. It's easier to write a small OS compared to a small browser. Implementing window managers inside a browser is not very hard or unusual. Some browsers do it in their main UI too. I was suggesting an extension of that concept. If it can improve the UX of a browser, why insist on gatekeeping it to the OS window manager?
> What stops you from putting two tabs side-by-side right now?
Where have you ever seen that done satisfactorily? Forget the numerous bars and panels all over the place that take up so much space. When have you ever been able to share information seamlessly like in a single window? It's so frustrating that it's a joke as a solution.
> You know, that you can put the menubar into the OS panel?
On which platform? How many WMs/DEs you know offer that facility? Unlike on MacOS where you can do that, window managers have a few dozen menu bars that aren't even compatible with each other. How many OS panels will each browser have to integrate with? Here instead, I'm suggesting the use of a technology that's already there - the web engine. In fact, that's how most browsers implement their main UI already. But it's not quite well integrated with the engine, at least in Firefox. My suggestion was to remove that limitation. You're objecting to something that's already there.
If you need something to be upset about browsers, there are plenty of egregious changes being pushed down the throats of the users. In contrast, I wasn't suggesting anything that the user has to accept without questions. It's also something that can be done with the building blocks already available. In fact, the changes you object to are already being partially implemented by many projects and are well-received by users as far as I can see. If we are this cynical about trying out great ideas from other platforms, what sort of progress are we expecting anyway?
I dont have the option yet! The menu entry is missing for me.
UX of profiles in Firefox is bad. See how Chrome does it.
This is about a new UI, very similar to what Chrome offers.
I was waiting for this feature
It's annoying these get grouped in the taskbar unlike Chrome profiles. Surely the main use case is to have a "Firefox" and a "Firefox (Work)" pinned separately to the taskbar and have them act as two completely different environments?
Curious, I've been running 2 profiles at once for a while on MacOS and they have separate icons / app management. It's a Windows thing.
A way you might get around this (if acceptable) is to run one profile from a beta or developer version of Firefox which has a separate app path & icon and may result in the behaviour you want.
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Firefox profiles suck. Their UX is so bad. Containers are better but still have their issues. I use Containerise plus Cookie AutoDelete plus Temporary Containers to give me what is effectively per-tab private browsing. The major downside is that I have to copy containers.json (which enumerates all of the dedicated containers I have defined, e.g., for Facebook), my Containerise rules (which automatically puts certain web sites into specific containers), and my Cookie AutoDelete config (which says which cookies to delete and when) among browsers manually. I wish more things supported Firefox's sync feature. I ended up adding them to my dotfiles, so it isn't too painful, but it definitely isn't grandparent friendly.
> Firefox profiles suck. Their UX is so bad.
That's what these changes aim to fix. You're getting a Chromium-like profile switcher/manager.
> Containers are better
Containers are very good... for container stuff. Profiles allow us to have different bookmarks, settings, extensions, themes, etc. Different tools for different jobs. I use both!
What are you all talking about? What is wrong with the existing ProfileManager?
If you look at about:profiles and compare it to the new UI or to what Chromium has offered for years, then I think you'll understand that the new UI is much better for the average user. There are also improvements for operating systems like macOS, where profiles always worked, but switching between them wasn't exactly a nice experience.
You can still use the old profile manager. At the pace Mozilla moves, it will be there for years.
The old UI != about:profiles. I never knew about:profiles even existed for a long time, why I was already happy using the profiles UI for years. I mean the profiles UI, that pops up at startup.
> If you look at about:profiles and compare it to the new UI or to what Chromium has offered for years, then I think you'll understand that the new UI is much better for the average user.
No I think this looks way worse, than the native UI, they have had for decades and hope they don't remove the old UI, so it startup doesn't become slower and more annoying.