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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
I've been using this hack for a while now: Firefox developer edition as my "work" profile and the regular Firefox for personal browsing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Glad to see improvements here -- switching between profiles has always been a weak spot for Firefox!
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.
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.
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 are great. But last I checked, it did not seem possible to run two parallel instances of Firefox with separate profiles. Has this been improved?
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!
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.
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 hope that they will not remove old UI for profiles and do not decide to show old profiles in new UI.
How does that differ from the existing profiles? Firefox has had profiles for decades.
I've got Firefox 144.2 on Android; are profiles available there? If so, how does one use them?
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.
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?
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.
I dont have the option yet! The menu entry is missing for me.
A profile for each site you visit by default please
UX of profiles in Firefox is bad. See how Chrome does it.
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?
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.
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.