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akazantsev | 7 months ago

Firefox has no profiles. It has a bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.

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pritambaral|7 months ago

> Firefox has no profiles.

Patently false. Been using profiles for years.

> bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.

Rarely have I had to that. Until I added rules to open certain URLs in specific containers.

> Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here.

Absolutely not. Profiles are a poor "alternative" to containers. How do I add a rule to pin URLs to specific profiles? How would that even work, if it did? A new window for some links? Re-use some random window with the same profile? How do I switch to it? Switch back? Don't tell me to use the Window Manager via Alt-Tab. I organise tabs into windows by shared context.

Then there's the whole issue of sync. Profiles don't share anything. Each profile needs to be configured individually. I like not having to add uBlock Origin to every browser profile. I like not having to think if I have my password for this rarely visited site in this profile or another one. Or a bookmark. Or form info.

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Just because containers have no use to you / you couldn't find a use for them, doesn't mean the rest of us also shouldn't have the luxury of using this feature. Feel free to use Profiles as you'd like. Leave what works for us alone.

leoapagano|7 months ago

Firefox's "answer" to profiles is to run essentially two (or more) copies of the browser rather than only copying the profile-specific parts of each profile. This leads to a lot of wasted CPU cycles and RAM and is a very suboptimal solution compared to what Chromium and Safari do these days, not to mention that the ability to create and switch profiles is not included in the UI by default and requires an extension to access.

CharlieDigital|7 months ago

I personally prefer containers to profiles. Rather have one window with many tabs than many windows.

paavope|7 months ago

I use profiles on Firefox daily and they work fine

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

akazantsev|7 months ago

The only way to access it with `about:profiles`? It looks like a joke. How could users possibly find this?

UPD. The more I look at this, the worse it gets. Hidden under a special URL, requires you to launch the default profile before you can switch to another profile (yes-yes, there are command-line hacks). It's more like a user data manager for devs than profiles for users. Even containers look better than these profiles.

keyringlight|7 months ago

Another thing you can do is run multiple profiles at the same time with the -no-remote argument , so "firefox -P profilename -no-remote"

MatejKafka|7 months ago

Containers feel like a much more useful feature to me than profiles - I don't wanna open a new window for each website that I want to isolate from my main session, but with containers, it's trivial.

l72|7 months ago

I mostly agree, and I personally just use containers (and heavily!) However, that has not been the case for my spouse. Profiles are important to her in two scenarios:

1. The primary website she uses for grad school (canvas) REQUIRES third party cookies to be enabled for it to work. Containers cannot have different settings here, but profiles can. So she can have a School profile that enables 3rd party cookies and she just uses this profile for Canvas.

2. She likes to keep ALL of her work stuff separate and not have that sync to her personal mobile. So she has Personal Profile (with containers) and a Work Profile (also with containers). The two profiles are themed differently, so it makes it very clear if she is in her "work" browser or "personal" browser.

Firefox's profile management has been a struggle for her (I found creating different application icons for each profile worked best), and I am very excited about the new profile manager!

uallo|7 months ago

> Firefox has no profiles.

It does now, it is being rolled out gradually:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management

jraph|7 months ago

I didn't know about this new feature, that looks nice. One can force-enable it with the browser.profiles.enabled config.

Firefox havs always had profiles (about:profiles, firefox -P). I do hope this new feature will be able to manage profiles created with the current method.

pta2002|7 months ago

This is weird to me because I so much prefer Firefox's per-tab containers to having to use separate windows for profiles. I wish chrome had something like it.

germandiago|7 months ago

The problem here IMHO is that when many tabs are open it becomes confusing quickly which tabs have what. With a profile everything is clear.

I used Firefox and I like it but honestly the profiles were more difficult to use than Chrome's.

sorenjan|7 months ago

I have a shortcut that starts a separate profile like this:

  <path to firefox.exe> -profile <path to profile folder> -no-remote
Separate bookmarks, separate search engines, separate history, etc. I've been using it for years, I usually have a Firefox window for each profile open on separate desktops, there's no problems running them at the same time.

VerdisQuo5678|7 months ago

firefox has had profiles for years, maybe decades its hidden in about:profiles i guess they're just adding a proper ui now