Hacker News Reader

Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

In fairness, needing to play with launch arguments is probably exactly why it's so little used.

Can also be launched from about:profiles, which can't be bookmarked, so, yeah.

it actually can be bookmarked. i am missing something?

I don't think so, unless they mean that the individual profiles themselves can't be bookmarked. I certainly have about:profiles bookmarked only to make it appear in the URL bar slightly faster when I start typing, but it also does open through the bookmarks menu.

> have about:profiles bookmarked only to make it appear in the URL bar slightly faster

OH! this is super clever after a decade of me typing about:config and other that I never remember completely ! this is so much easier ;p

Yeah, that's become my main use for bookmarks. I prefer to treat the URL bar like a CLI as much as I can, and to not have the bookmarks bar take up space.

Actually, it would be kind of awesome if the URL bar really could act more like a command line for the browser. Hmmm.

interesting maybe this could be done with an extension using the omnibox api...

Seems I was thoroughly misremembering. I guess I was thinking it nice to be able to pin it to New Tab or make it a toolbar button or something, and my brain just compacted that beyond recognition. Sorry for that.

thanks, today I learned.

Firefox has useful about:about pages.

With some revamp they could capitalize on some of them much more. After newtab, the last addition was "Firefox View" for recently closed tabs or synced tabs. I'd wish the same for history, bookmarks and downloads. Those very much show their origin as sqlite browser.

I think it's OK to expect "normal people" to do that, but I've been trying to embrace my OS's feature sets (stuff like desktop shortcuts) to configure my computer how I want it to.

There can be some digging involved, but if you get things set up then you can have your cake and eat it too (most of the time at least)

It's certainly a great flexibility to have access to those kind of things, that's why a lot of technical people also like command line utilities.

But honestly there is no reason to not also provide GUIs for using these features.

Indeed. Clearly, the reasons for not making this a bit easier, are not technical. It's there and I know I can create shortcuts and launch apps with parameters but why should I go through this trouble. After I have configured everything, I don't want to tinker with my browser outside work.

A simple GUI would do the trick.

You can create .desktop files (or whatever the windows equivalent is) so you start them like normal firefox.

You can take this a step further. You can copy the existing firefox.application to ~/.local/share/applications in triplicate.

Leave the first the same, but add Hidden=true, NoDisplay=true. Then rename the other two "personal.desktop" "companyname.desktop" and change the Name values inside, and add "-P {personal/companyname}" to the Exec line.

Now your application launcher, if functioning correctly, should hide the default Firefox instance (which due to stupid Firefox behavior can do... unpredictable things), and instead you can type "personal" or "companyname" to have Firefox launch with those specific profiles.

It's really quite fantastic, as good a solution as any I could ask for.

How do you keep from getting them mixed up in the task bar when they're both running?

Presumably there’s a configuration directive to change icon?

I'm 5 days, late, but yes, I changed the Icon directive, and also I use a tiling WM and different themes per profile, so there's zero chance of mixing them up.

Is the creation of .desktop files within reach of many of the poeple intimidated by command line flags?

You can also add [Desktop action ...] sections to your .desktop file for each profile, this will add new right-click/context menu options for easy launching of the profiles from your Linux dock.

I do that for dedicated netflix profile (with company icon) having DRM enabled, very useful.

If Firefox did extend the Profile Manager to allow for this kind of personalisation and OS integration (profiles showing up as their own, customizeable launcher icon), that'd be another win.

The windows equiv is .lnk. Or in GUI windows world create a shortcut and then modify the launching parameters using properties on the lnk file. You could also drop the string into .bat/.cmd files (but that would probably leave a cmd box running in the background). Downside to .lnk files is they are binary so you have to use an editor that understands them (like windows explorer).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com