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. Maybe it's to my particular startup flags, but I eventually gave up on it. (b) It would be super nice if profiles could common prefs. I certainly don't expect the developers to make that a feature, but it seems like fixing (a) and using symlinks would do it. But overall, yeah profiles work great.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 the new UI changes. You get 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!
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. Maybe it's to my particular startup flags, but I eventually gave up on it. (b) It would be super nice if profiles could common prefs. I certainly don't expect the developers to make that a feature, but it seems like fixing (a) and using symlinks would do it. But overall, yeah profiles work great.
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.
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.
I do this on Linux (Mint) and it works as expected.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
> 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.
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.
there's an old '-P' flag that shows a small ui
see https://imgur.com/a/Tmt3oEL
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.
Does it still work?
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)
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).
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.
Profiles were in Firefox for a long time now. It looks like they finally have made a proper UI for it.
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.
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...
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.
Glad to see improvements here -- switching between profiles has always been a weak spot for Firefox!
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.
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
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 the new UI changes. You get 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!