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Comment by benjamir | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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