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Comment by rideontime | Hacker News Reader

If Containers is a sufficient alternative to Chromium's profiles, I'm switching, that was the only thing holding me back.

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Firefox has its own profiles, which are separate from containers.

`about:profiles` shows you a window for creating and switching to a different one. I add that as a bookmark on the bookmarks toolbar of the two profiles I use

I believe there is a `-P` option to open a new window with a specific profile. I do not use it. I usually just open the browser and then go to the aforementioned bookmark and open the other profile.

I use different colorways to differentiate the windows between the two profiles.

There may be addons that alleviate a few of the pain-points with Firefox profiles. I have not tried to find any.

IMO containers are easier to use than profiles. The main issue is that history seems to be shared across containers, but being able to mix tabs from multiple containers in the same window is very practical. Though I guess it increases the risk of accidentally opening some website in the wrong container if this is one concern. (though there is a feature to make some website always open in a given container)

The main difference is that profiles allow for different extensions to be enabled. You effectively get completely different browsers. The price for that power is a bit of IT geekery - if used regularly, you'll need either a bookmark to about:profiles or a desktop shortcut pointing to Firefox.exe -P yourProfile.

I mostly use containers for everyday work, but when a site looks borked (which typically happens because of strict ad-blocking extensions doing their job), I temporarily switch to my "unprotected" profile that has no ad-blocking whatsoever.

(And also when I test new extensions I build, but that's a very niche use case.)

I like maintaining a work/clean profile and a personal one. It is very annoying to mix histories when something like screensharing happens are you do not want to advertise what sort of messageboards or forums you post on.

Containers is what every browser should be or have. Only Firefox as far as I know has containers as thoroughly.

Chrome doesn’t. Safari has something similar.

I use first party isolation and block third party cookies (and delete first party ones on tab close). This is as if I had a "container" for every new website.

For my money this should be the default behaviour on ff.

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