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Comment by leoapagano | Hacker News Reader

Firefox's "answer" to profiles is to run essentially two (or more) copies of the browser rather than only copying the profile-specific parts of each profile. This leads to a lot of wasted CPU cycles and RAM and is a very suboptimal solution compared to what Chromium and Safari do these days, not to mention that the ability to create and switch profiles is not included in the UI by default and requires an extension to access.

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I think you may be mixing up profiles and containers.

Profiles do have a built-in UI at about:profiles or by launching Firefox with -P, neither of which requires an extension. Admittedly this UI is a bit basic, but a better version is being rolled out (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management). Running multiple profiles side by side does indeed involve running multiple instances of the browser.

Containers are an internal API and need an extension like Multi-account Containers to provide a GUI (though this is an official extension by Mozilla), however they don't require running multiple copies of the browser.

The new profile manager has already been enabled for most users.

If you don't see it in the main menu yet, type `about:config` into the address bar and toggle `browser.profiles.enabled`.

The new profile manager has already been enabled for most users.

If you don't see it in the main menu yet, type `about:config` into the address bar and toggle `browser.profiles.enabled`.

I just did this and it doesn't see the multiple profiles I've been using for years through about:profile. Strange.

That's by design:

>This feature is separate from the about:profiles experience, and we currently have no plans to change how about:profiles works. You may continue to use about:profiles if that is better for your workflow.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-out-firefox-p...

Just tried it out - definitely an improvement UX-wise, but it still essentially runs two copies of Firefox rather than only isolating profile-specific features.

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