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Comment by damianh | Hacker News Reader

Am a firefox user since 0.9. I see there's a lot of love for Firefox in the responsonses here.

However, the profile UI and general managment experience compared to Chrome/Edge is pure trash. No, container tabs is not a viable substitute (my work and my personal profiles don't even share bookmarks). Yes am aware of a third party addon that requires additional software to be installed - this just proves the point further.

This issue was reported 13 years ago! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=662025

So today I'm using Firefox only for personal and chrome (/edge) profiles for everything else. Only reason I am sticking with Firefox is because of the Android version. If I could get ublock origin working on edge/chrome on android I'd probably abandon Firefox.

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Safari really nailed their profile implementation in that regard - separate bookmarks, history and session and that in addition to tab groups. I think Firefox is not far from this, only if they could refine the experience.

Are there any notable differences between profiles in Safari and Chrome?

Safari seems to be less intrusive about the boundary between profiles. For instance, you can use the same bookmarks and favourites if you wanted to, and you don't have to reinstall all extensions (just turn them on and off per profile).

You also don't need an account to create a profile (where I think Chrome requires sign in with Google for each profile, at least on iOS), Safari is happy to sync all profiles, extensions, tab groups, start page settings etc through iCloud with your Apple ID.

Contained tabs instead of an updated profile system was a bad choice for Firefox. It will continue to lag behind because of this.

Strong agreement

Disagree. They serve different purposes, and are both very useful. And it's not like the profiles system needs vast developer resources that containers "sucked up" or something, the problem with profiles is mainly a UX/design issue, and even more pertinently, a lack-of-attention issue.

Yeah. Before Firefox Quantum (i.e. abandon of XUL-based add-dons), one can at least use 3rd-party addons to make switching profiles easier.

Now I barely use profiles in Firefox while I have 5-6 profiles in Chrome for various things as it's much easier.

What's so bad about typing in: about:profiles, into the address bar and selecting the profile you want to use? Or even creating a shortcut with the: -p, option to select one n starting Firefox.

Genuinely, what else are chrome/edge offering that is a deal breaker for you?

> what else are chrome/edge offering

Having a simple UI that you can just click and launch other profiles, really.

This is available in the: about:profiles, page. But not directly from the UI. I tend to use, like others here have suggested, desktop shortcuts that open profiles directly.

> Genuinely, what else are chrome/edge offering that is a deal breaker for you?

Unless you fiddle around with using different themes for each profile, or install kludgy extensions, there's nothing indicating which profile a window is currently using.

This is true but I actually don't mind this at all.

You might not mind, but it's a papercut for a regular user wanting to use profiles.

The thing is that it's a also problem that can easily be resolved with some small UI tweaks. Everything we need for first class handling of profiles in Firefox already exists, save a more intuitive UI.

I ended up modifying userChrome.css to display the profile after the URL.

How does one launch a profile from the about:profiles page? ;)

It's a concept that is first class supported and easy to use in all othe browsers. There is just a ton of usability issues across the board, even with the third party addon.

I suppose it's just what you're used to. Once you're at about:profiles you're presented with a list of profiles to open and options to create new ones. Fairly simple to use, though from other comments not as obvious as other browsers.

> What's so bad about typing in

From any browser window and any context, I can use CMD+Shift+M and either open a new window in a different profile, or switch to the first available window for that profile. The browser then clearly indicates which profile I am in and has some UI elements for it as well.

So it's just like any other core browser feature: having it being integrated into the experience directly, and being able to use it from anywhere, with a shortcut or clear UI element, is a much better experience than having to navigate to a settings page or use a bespoke application shortcut.

If having to open a bookmark always required opening a bookmark webpage, instead of the bookmark list or the url bar integrations, then that would be a much worse experience and certainly a reason to prefer one browser over another.

You know what most people do not even know this exists. Even if it exists why would they prefer this instead of just clicking user icon and switching their profile as in chrome or edge.

Most people like simple and boring UI which is straight forward.

on android I use Kiwi browser sometimes - it loads ublock origin.

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