[HN Gopher] Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all th...
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Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you
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Author : darkwater
Score : 59 points
Date : 2025-10-29 08:10 UTC (7 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.mozilla.org)
| sorcercode wrote:
| 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)
| happymellon wrote:
| > 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.
| sorcercode wrote:
| 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.
| sudobash1 wrote:
| > 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.
| attendant3446 wrote:
| Profiles were in Firefox for a long time now. It looks like
| they finally have made a proper UI for it.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| 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!
| crtasm wrote:
| Nice to know about that. Odd that it doesn't list any of my
| existing profiles though
| uniqueuid wrote:
| 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).
| iamcalledrob wrote:
| Glad to see improvements here -- switching between profiles has
| always been a weak spot for Firefox!
| x0x0 wrote:
| 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.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| 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.
| conaclos wrote:
| Have you tried `firefox --no-remote --profile <path>`?
|
| In my case, I am able to launch several Firefox instances with
| distinct profiles.
| mrb wrote:
| 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.
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