Hacker News Reader

Comment by anfilt | Hacker News Reader

Firefox does have support for multiple profiles. You just to need to set it up.

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

Also if you want to prompt what profile to use every time you use firefox just add -P like this "firefox.exe -P" in your shortcut/softlink or script that starts firefox.

View on HN

It just doesn't have usable profile switching. Sounds like something a competent engineer should be able to implement in a week, yet users have been begging for it for a decade and it's still not there. This is the only thing that holds me on Chrome.

try about:profiles

I think his point is that if you have to do about:profiles, then that's not usable for a lot of people. Having something that works like containers is a lot more usable: click, select profile.

My point is that about:profiles improves upon -P. But cf. their other post, they're actually after containers, not profiles.

See, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Whereas in Chrome I _don't have to_ "try about:profiles".

The very basic requirement for me is this: I want to completely separate my "work" internet from my "personal" internet, yet I also want to be able to easily switch between the two. Firefox makes this unnecessarily difficult and un-ergonomic.

Containers in Fx makes this super-easy, try it out.

They do not allow for complete separation of "work" and "personal" internet. They literally show both in the same window.

I consider that a feature. Nothing stops you from only using a single and different container per window, though.

I consider that an epic fail. The last thing I want is to confuse the two, or to have to laboriously manually separate tabs into windows. That's not to mention that I also don't want to share the passwords between the two profiles either.

What's the most frustrating is Firefox already has multiple profile support. All it's missing is an ergonomic way to switch and manage the profiles.

You can have two desktop shortcuts with different icons that start the browser with different profiles. With different profiles you can make the browser windows have very different customized looks and differnt profiles also have separate password storages.

Or I could just, you know, continue using Chrome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com