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Comment by fps | Hacker News Reader

Firefox's clumsy profile support is the one thing that makes me keep switching back to chrome. I really prefer firefox sync to chrome's implementation, and some of firefox's tab organization tools are way better than chrome's. But I use many of the same webapps in my personal life as I do in my work life, and being able to run two profiles simultaneously, and start them up without having to launch firefox from the terminal every time, was difficult.

What they've implemented seems to be better than chrome's profiles, in that it's easier to create a new profile for a specific context (so I don't have to sort things into a "work" bucket and a "personal" bucket.) It will be interesting to see how the contexts interact with plugins.

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I agree that Firefox profile management is not user-friendly at all. I have an advice for you though, you don't need to open Firefox from a terminal if you want to be able to choose your profile at start-up.

«all» you have to do is go to ~/.mozilla/firefox/profile.ini and change it with:

```

[General]

StartWithLastProfile=0

```

Now Firefox will open a dialogue box at start-up asking you for the profile you want to use.

Alternately,

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments

    -P "<profile name>" Starts with a given profile name (profile name is case sensitive).      
    -no-remote          Enables running multiple instances of the application with different profiles; [1] used with -P 

    #!/bin/bash
    case "$1" in
	personal | work | banking | shopping)
	    firefox -no-remote -P "$1" ;;
	*) echo "unknown arg: $1"; return 1; ;;
    esac

and either rename profile directories, or the case statement labels, and optionally associate calls to the script with icons/widgets. [code not tested, use at own risk, ymmv, etc.]

You an also manage your Firefox profiles using the about:profiles page.

> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments

However, stymaar (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11916985 )'s suggestion seemed to be specifically about avoiding the command line:

> I have an advice for you though, you don't need to open Firefox from a terminal if you want to be able to choose your profile at start-up.

I don't know, on Mac or Windows, how (although it would be nice) to wrap your script, or any other command-line executable, as an app that takes its arguments as parameters specified on double-click.

Doesn't it also just genuinely feel more sluggish to you? Just installed Nightly to test this feature out, and then took another minute to use the developer tools to do some debugging, and the whole experience felt less smooth. Maybe only microseconds of a difference in <my action> and the <browser's response>, but noticeable nonetheless.

Nightly builds do include extra debugging instrumentation which makes them slower than released versions.

Do you have extensions installed? Nightly has E10s default-enabled, and there's currently still pretty bad performance problems when using certain extensions with E10s.

Basically, extension developers can "shim" their add-ons, which, as far as I understand it, tells Firefox that it has to handle things which are affected by the extension in a single-threaded way, again. And because the world is a grim place, this doesn't just get you back to non-E10s performance, but is actually worse.

Eventually, add-on developers should properly port their extensions to E10s and then those performance problems will disappear, but at the moment they are still very frequent and when Mozilla rolls out E10s, they will also only default-enable it for users without extensions for this exact reason.

If you want to troubleshoot this, I would recommend looking at about:performance and www.arewee10syet.com. You should probably check how performance is in a new profile[0] first, though, just to make sure that you're not trying to replace extensions when it might be caused by something else.

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

Maybe this add-on might help: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profileswitch...

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