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Comment by throwaway613834 | Hacker News Reader

Multiple profiles are such a pain. You don't even get the common history and autocomplete that comes with having a single profile. I've used them for a while with Chrome and they're just too annoying to use. This looks like it could turn out really great.

EDIT: It seems I was unclear in what I was trying to say. I wasn't criticizing multiple profiles in general; I was criticizing using multiple profiles as a replacement for containers. The way I see it, they don't substitute for each other, and they both have their own great use cases.

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Chrome profiles are an absolute joy for splitting between personal/work activities. They also work better for, say, switching between Google accounts than the "inline" Google account switcher, which is often buggy and at least used to have incomplete support (does the Analytics dashboard finally support the account switcher?).

I agree, they're fantastic for their use cases. I'm trying to say this is not one of them, and trying to use them as container replacements results in an awful and painful experience. That's all.

To my understanding, firefox also has support for multiple profiles at that level, but it may be by app launch, not by window.

It can be per-window: in about:profiles there's a "Launch profile in new browser" button underneath every profile.

> You don't even get the common history and autocomplete

That's a feature!

I have observed dozens of time coworkers using their BYOD work laptpos that autocompleted porn URL. Dozens.

You've got to use an entirely separate browser for that IMO. Even with Chrome's totally segregated user profiles, it's too easy to pull up a NSFW URL in the wrong Chrome window and have it pollute your "work" profile.

I use FF for work and a special Chrome profile (not the default one) for anything that shouldn't pop up in my autocomplete in front of coworkers/clients.

That way it's pretty hard to screw up...

Frankly you shouldn’t ever look at porn on a work machine, no matter how much they encourage you to think of it as your personal machine. It is only a liability.

Hmm, I find it odd that you want cross-noise in your autocompletes. I use the things for doing personal browsing on work machines and find them very convenient.

But on Firefox it seems totally unusable because of near misses in UI. I haven't found a nice menu for switching between profiles, or a way of getting a list of available profiles short of rooting about in my settings. The default profile is can change itself in strange, and will only sometime coincide with the profile called "default".

I think you misunderstood what I said (might have been since I wasn't too clear on this in my comment). I wasn't criticizing the profile feature itself. Profiles are fantastic for your use case. I was criticizing using profiles for THIS use case (i.e. substituting for containers). They simply don't substitute for the container feature; they solve different problems. One is for separation of concerns and one is for privacy/security. The two sometimes affect each other but they're not the same concerns.

The thing you are looking for is about:profiles

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