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Comment by happymellon | Hacker News Reader

> that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers

But thats a massive difference.

I have work profiles and a personal profile. I have password manager profiles for clients (clients will provide their own PM logins to segregate their access) which are different between them, and having separate profiles is huge.

Containers are great, especially for crappy websites that use your sessions for tracking which page you are on, but they are no where near powerful enough.

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You've hit on the relevant distinction: user context vs system context.

I use containers to separate system context (partitioning cookies and site data) while remaining in the same user context (e.g. "personal browsing").

I use profiles for when I need different user contexts (different bookmarks and frequently used sites for different clients or projects).

When only one tool is available, you are limited by the constraints of that tool (e.g. bookmarks bleeding over between user contexts when using containers, or having to copy extensions or bookmarks into every profile).

I like to have it both ways. Given the options available so far I've preferred to have bookmarks shared between both and mainly keep tabs / working context separate.

The best I've managed so far is to run separate instances of Firefox with the same Sync Account which appear as separate 'devices'. Nightly with a different icon and theme makes it obvious which is which.

This way if I come across something interesting I want dig into further on my own time, I can bookmark it as well as 'Send Tab To Device -> Home' or 'Phone' depending on where I want to be and what environment I want to have available when I see it later (e.g. read only, or hands on).

Yes, I may be hoarding a lot of tabs but that's a separate issue...

Cookies can already be partitioned. I am not sure if it's default but at the very least it's a config flag. It's called site isolation. I have seen Firefox people say containers kind of become unnecessary with this in place in terms of privacy but they kind of have an opaque whitelist to get some things to work. The biggest example is google properties.

> I use profiles for when I need different user contexts (different bookmarks and frequently used sites for different clients or projects).

This is the part where the new Firefox profiles fall short. I just checked and cannot create two separate profiles with the same email address. So it's not possible tohave different profiles for different _projects_ at work, for example.

Containers are the way to go with this, but then they are not exactly intuitive. Arc got this right and Zen is showing a lot of promise.

that's fair (and glad profiles have finally arrived in FF for that reason); personally, i don't use password managers linked to any specific browser but i can understand your use case.

> and glad profiles have finally arrived in FF for that reason

Profiles have been there for years, been using them since at least 2010.

sort of. it was a nuts and bolt implementation. by their own admission it was reintroduced to make it more friendly. from a comment I saw made elsewhere:

> yes about:profiles has existed for a long time. We have heard feedback from many of our users to make it user friendly and accessible. We are introducing many new additional functionalities in this new profile management experience (avatars, colors/themes, shortcuts, desktop icons, default links/apps per profile, copy profile, move tabs between profiles). Stayed tuned for these updates.

so yes, you are right. it did exist.

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