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Comment by streblo | Hacker News Reader

Here's what I desperately want from Firefox, which I currently have from Chrome: isolated browser profiles tied to an account. I have two browser windows open at all times, one for my personal stuff and one for my work stuff. I want to keep those two windows totally isolated, where I log in with all my work accounts in one window, and all my personal accounts in the other window. Chrome does this by tying the window to a Gmail account, I'd happily sign up for two Firefox accounts if I could do this.

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If you want the exact equivalent, use Firefox profiles (-p at startup, or install the profile switcher addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...).

But Firefox has a much better feature: tab containers. You can attach a label to a tab, and only tabs sharing this label will share states, such as cookies, cache, localstorage and so on. This means you don't need to open a new window. You can have 2 HN accounts with each a different user logged in, in 2 tabs, next to each other, distinguishable with a color.

You can use it by activating a few settings in about:config (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers#w_for-advanc...), but the easiest way it to use the addon : https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/multi-account-co...

Tab Containers are a nice feature, but aren't quite there yet. For example, history is currently not isolated per container:

https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/1... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283320

Multiple browser profiles also let me have one profile for work, another one for personal stuff, and yet another one only with stuff like vue/react/svelte dev tools and remote debugging enabled, and _then_ decide which one to open at any given time. This instead of opening every container at once, or something like selectively opening a bunch of bookmarks manually into a specific container (I use buku to manage and sync my bookmarks too, so no tab container support there).

>>>You can use it by activating a few settings in about:config

Not. On. Android.

Can you have 2 different profiles on chrome opens at the same time on android?

Firefox has supported this for decades, it just doesn't have a very nice UI for managing it.

Simply start it with "firefox -P" and create two separate profiles (call them "work" and "personal"). Then just start two instances of Firefox, with "firefox -P work" and "firefox -P personal". They will be totally isolated - cookies, history, addons, everything.

The UX for profiles is fairly awful compared to chrome. There's a web extension to make things better but it requires a companion application.

Ideally they'd expose more options through web extension APIs or build in a native profile switcher in the main ui rather than as a command line flag and a dedicated about: page. It'd also be cool if the account containers could be customized to behave like profiles e.g. isolate history, but that gets a classic "we need to do this yak shave first" response whenever it gets brought up.

There is also "about:profiles". Granted not pretty like Chrome profiles but it is there.

For me, one profile with "Temporary Containers" and "Multi-Account Containers" works well enough.

Firefox has an "official" add-on called Multi-Account Containers. This isolates website state (cookies etc.) but not history/settings/extensions.

Alternatively, you can start Firefox with `--no-remote -ProfileManager` flags to get a totally separate instance, like Chrome does.

Personally, I use Multi-Account Containers together with the Temporary Containers add-on, to by default get a fresh cookie jar for each new tab, but I do have some websites tied to a named container for session persistence.

You can do this with Firefox's containers. Containers are a Firefox built-in feature, but without a UI; install the "Firefox multi-account containers" extension to get UI for containers. There are also a variety of other plug-ins that do useful stuff with containers; search for "container" in the Add-ons Manager to see what's available.

Firefox has this, it's called multi account containers. It's an add-on published by Mozilla.

You can use profiles with Firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

You can also use containers on Firefox for isolating specific sites

You can also type `about:profiles` in the address bar. This opens a page where you can create profiles and/or launch them in a new window.

>isolated browser profiles

Firefox can do that. Just run firefox -p.

>tied to an account

Is that really necessary?

> Is that really necessary?

Yes, I'd like extensions, history, cookies, etc to be tied to the account and have them be isolated. I can't do that now.

You can. Firefox profiles are totally isolated, including extensions, history, cookies and everything else. Why this isn't enough for you?

You can log in into accounts in each profile, of course, if you want.

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