Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

I would:

- Prioritise getting the new extension framework fully functional. And continue innovating on the capabilities that are exposed. Especially on mobile where the new fenix engine is still limited to a small whitelist of extensions

- Sort out the multi-profile story. Container tabs are great, but the chrome model is also a great fit for many workflow (e.g. different people in a house or home vs. work profiles).

- Try and work on making Gecko easily embeddable again. Webkit/Blink gets all the attention because it's easy to embed into things. I suspect Gecko needs to compete in this market if it hopes to survive. It needs to have more than one company invested in it.

This ship has probably sailed now as they've fired most of their Rust and Servo teams. But IMO they ought to have created a rust-based cross-platform UI framework. They tried to do it web-based with Firefox OS but that was too slow. But with a Rust solution I think they could have owned both the mobile and desktop application spaces, which could potentially have made them a bootload of money and been a huge win for linux.

Chrome’s Profiles are the #1 reason I use it over Firefox. If Firefox had as complete of an implementation as Chrome then I would consider switching, but until then Firefox is a non-starter for me.

I use all 3 of these profiles all day every day for work:

* one personal profile logged into personal Google

* one work profile managed by the company, logged into company Google

* one development profile with all the debugging extensions installed, like React and Redux tools (they require access to all pages all the time)

headscratch I used profiles with Ff for ages... what is the difference to Chrome's?

In Chrome there's an icon you click to switch. Honestly, if someone would create a FF extension that was just that, it would probably cover 90% of what's considered superior in Chrome.

have you used container tabs? those are effectively "different profiles" for what most people consider them. It's still shared extensions and history and bookmarks but you can login with different accounts in different tabs and it keeps that separate.

An important UX difference is that Firefox's default "New Tab" keyboard shortcut doesn't respect the container of the current tab. I've found that it's really easy to accidentally switch back to the main container.

I would think it be trivial to make an extension that respects the current tab container when opening a new tab. Hell if it's not there I'll make one.

I use container tabs, temporary tabs and the containerise extension to help manage things. I use it so there's stronger isolation between the websites I visit, and cookies are cleaned up when I close the browser.

That's on my main/personal profile.

I have separate profiles for work stuff, one for each client or organisation I work with. On those, I only access sites that are relevant to the organisation, and I have a lot fewer protections. I keep long sessions, I leave cookies in place, etc. It's a lot more convenient that way.

I have different sets of bookmark in my school and regular profile (because in most cases they were opened for very different purposes).

Its called "Profile Switcher for Firefox": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

That looks quite good. It's a little over the top with having to install external software though.

The usability and discoverability. I use almost exclusively Firefox but I have stopped using the profiles since the UX isn't good enough.

about:profiles looks like a debugging page, not something you use for launching a profile. And I'm not referring to its aspect, but usability. It's not made to be used daily.

I'll have to see if it can be "designed" with userChrome.css or something and I'll give it a try.

The only thing I can think of is that the UI is not as nice as chromes for switching? in chrome you can switch the profile from a menu option and there can be more than one profile active at a time with separate everything including extensions and bookmarks.

in firefox you don't get that easy switch and I am not sure the gui for the profiles is enabled by default. you have to manually start up firefox with a -P flag from the command line to get the profile manager. And you only get one profile active at a time.

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

That said, 90% of the time you can use container tabs and it is almost the equivalent of that.

> And you only get one profile active at a time.

This isn't true. As I'm writing this, I have three Firefox windows open, each in a different profile. What makes you think you can only have one profile active at a time?

were there any hoops you had to run to get that to work? afaict that's not possible ootb without adding a flag to the command line. I'll admit that I haven't really tried it since many years ago.

for 90% of the users out there that we need to convince to use firefox: having a command line switch is about the same as not having the feature at all... chrome has a menu item that brings up a brand new window in that profile.

I want firefox to succeed and it's my daily driver.

You do have to use the command-line and there is a single hoop: the `--new-instance` flag. I agree the situation could be made "normal" user friendly and it isn't right now.

When I open Chrome, I can open any profile straight away from the menu. On Mac, there’s just one Chrome icon.

When I open Firefox, I have to go to a page that looks like a developer debug mode, and then open a new profile in a new Firefox instance. I now have two Firefox icons in my dock. I normally work with three profiles, so now I have three Firefox icons in my dock all called Firefox. 66.6% of the time I press the wrong one.

The problem is that Firefox has to be at least as good as Chrome to succeed. Being _almost_ as good as Chrome means people will just use Chrome.

Why not use the firefox profiles?

I also use multiple profiles. My setup is as fallows.

  firefox -ProfileManager

Create 2 profiles work and private.

Change the theme of work to orange and private to black.

Create two .desktop files and append to the Exec line -P work (or private) and the Name to include (work)

I have work on desktop 5 and private on desktop 8 and 9.

Works like a charme for me. Additional bonus. Use container to add additional seperation.

Or, just open `about:profiles` and press buttons.

They probably don't know, because Firefox doesn't bump your nose into the fact, that it has profiles.

In Chrome I can switch from one profile to another as fast as opening a new tab (i.e. instantly). Can Firefox do that?

With containers you can. It's literally opening a new tab.

If you have two profiles open at the same time like described you can easily switch desktops. The clear seperation of work and private browsing sessions helps me as well.

What is easy here? In Chrome, on macOS, it's command-` to switch windows and command-shift-m to open a new window in with a specific profile.

Also, links always open in the profile that is currently in the foreground. Is that possible in Firefox? Last I heard it isn't, but I haven't checked in a while.

Yes, there is but I don't know if it works for macOS since it works for me in Windows.

Set the profile you prefer to open for links as a default profile and make sure to tick the option to automatically use the default profile without opening the profile manager. Then for the second profile, you need to use the shortcuts for that with the argument like this

firefox.exe -P "<profile_name>"

And make sure you leave it as capitalized P, I believe that is the argument. Then apply the setting and click the shortcut. It should be opening links to the default profile that you set in the profile manager.

I use it by the same way. FF is the best!

So I use this as well, but it utterly fails the elderly grandmother test.

Its not well known. Its not easily accessibly for non-technical users. & its not clear which profile you are currently using when you are using it.

How many elderly grandmothers and other non-technical users give two shits about having multiple profiles in their browser?

Not grandmother but my non-technical dad cares about this.

I would imagine huge number of non-technical users share a computer and want their own chrome profiles so that they can access their own emails without signing out of their family members. I know my middle-aged parents use Chrome in this way for example, and it would be a blocker for switching them to Firefox.

Is this basically a use case where they don't want to create separate Windows users for some reason, but still would want their own private space in the browser?

Honestly the elderly grandmother test is meant to model discovery for all users. Not actually use meant for grandmothers or even non-technical user.

But it is just 2 clicks to do the same thing in Chrome (and those two clicks are really fast thanks to Fitts's law).

about:profiles

I use Firefox's container tabs all the time, which segment exactly the same way as profiles (albiet with the same extension pool). Personally I prefer having blended tabs in a single window, or having additional segregation; I keep Amazon punted out to it's own container, as well as social media. I know it won't stop all the cross-identificaiton, but it should at least help.

What's wrong with Firefox Containers?

It doesn’t sync your entire experience. I have a completely different setup for each profile, and then I use Containers _within_ each profile. They’re not the same thing.

> Especially on mobile where the new fenix engine is still limited to a small whitelist of extensions

Fenix is bloody fantastic. I would double-down on this and really push the fact that (even with the limited extension list) it has uBlock Origin.

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