My work profile is logged into my work Gmail + AWS
Personal profile has my personal Google account.
The two won't mix.
I ended up keeping chrome just for work, and using firefox for personal life.
Then I grabbed Browser Tamer and set up an AHK v2 script that, when I click on and focus any browser window, it executes browser tamer's CLI to update the default browser. Thus I get the behavior of "open links in last used browser", which is the correct browser for whatever link I click 99.9% of the time.
My solution is: The system has a default browser that opens default links. On my work machine I have a different browser where I am for example logged in to my private github account I just never want to open a clicked link there anyway. Copy/pasting 2 times per day is fine.
Edit: found it: it's hidden behind the browser.profiles.enabled setting in about:config
The only real cost is that running things this way eats more memory, but I've not experienced OOM issues for years away from deliberately small VMs (for testing or small sever tasks) that turned out to be too small.
One feature I was missing from Chrome was Tab Groups. But recently (I don't know when it started) the feature showed up in FireFox too :-)
For example, I have a main profile where I have personal bookmarks and different extensions (and more aggressive adblocking). I also have a work profile with a different theme, different bookmarks, extensions, etc. And I use containers in both.
Containers are nice, but they're not profiles. We have to understand that not everyone can or wants to have one profile with everything in it.
It's kinda tiresome to see containers get peddled over and over as a "solution", when they're severely limited in what they offer compared to profiles. One feature set and clunky interface doesn't even get close to the use cases people have for profiles. It's not a solution.
I have a work profile with several containers inside, so that I can be logged into, e.g. GitHub and AWS, with multiple accounts at the same time.
I also have a primary personal profile, with a few containers primarily for cookie pollution separation.
I've never struggled with the "Profiles have bad UX" complaint, because I created a few different launchers for Firefox: work, personal, (a few others for special purposes like retail sites), and a default profile that launches the profile manager dialog at startup so I can select from a few dozen less-frequently-used (sometimes single-purpose) profiles. I like to keep separate things separated.
This took 20 minutes to set up, 15+ years ago(?) and has been perfectly convenient for me, but I've also recently read that Mozilla is working to improve profile switching.
This is what I'm saying and what people who recommend containers as a "replacement" for profiles sorely miss.
>20 minutes to set up
Meanwhile on Chrome this just worked out of the box and didn't have UI that's been abandoned for a decade.
The bigger problem for me is that (at least when I last tested Chrome profiles -- it's been a while), there was some browser config that was shared between profiles. Maybe extensions? I don't recall.
This was unexpected and undesired, so I went back to Firefox.
Anyway, there's no benefit to Firefox or its users if profile switching is ugly or clunky. They're improving this and that's a good thing for everyone.
I add an icon (slightly modified for each profile) to the script, and rename it to (e.g.) ~/Applications/Firefox-work.app for convenience. Works from the Dock, Finder, Spotlight, etc. I usually launch from the command line, but all the usual ways do work.
Improving the profile switching experience is great of course. But the above workaround has served me perfectly for as long as I can remember. Obv would not work for everyone.
I don't see anything weird in people asking for profiles. If anything your suggestion sounds weird.