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Comment by jmakov | Hacker News Reader

The most useful feature with the worst UX. You have to type about:profiles and then create a new profile. But imagin you now want to move old profiles to a new computer and FF happens to run in a Flatpack. Yeah, much fun

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You can (now?) create profiles from the account icon in the toolbar [1] and at least on my firefox install, you can also do it from the hamburger menu.

I use firefox via flatpak and had no issues so far accessing profile data (in one of the folders in ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/firefox/ - I keep a regular archive of the entire folder as backup).

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management

> Not all users will see the new Profiles menu in the toolbar, since this feature is being rolled out gradually

I don't see it yet, but hopefully soon.

You could use the about:config preference browser.profiles.enabled in the meantime I suppose.

Maybe it hasn't been rolled out to me yet. Or it might be because I'm not logged into a Firefox profile? It is only availiable to those logged in?

No I don't use sync at all. I think it might just require `browser.profiles.enabled` to be set to true in about:config, at least until wider rollout.

I don't have it on 144.0.2 on mac in either of those places, just as a datapoint

I'm on 144.0.2 on MacOS and I do have it. Under the hamburger menu in the upper right and near the top of the list. Never set up a profile on this machine before, so maybe that could be related?

I found out about profiles recently and I just couldn't believe that that's the standard way to access them. Also, it's not obvious which profile you are currently on, so there are some silly but necessary workarounds like having a dummy bookmark with the profile name on each or something like that, while it could just be a string next to the address bar.

It works really well though. Does exactly what I would expect and hope from such a feature.

I have different coloured themes for my profiles. Simple and immediate.

there's an old '-P' flag that shows a small ui

see https://imgur.com/a/Tmt3oEL

Does it still work?

yes. I just started using it last week to split work related browsing from personal stuff.

That used to be a start menu entry in the old days. I had heard it was removed but to my surprise -P works on my current linux. I'll have to see if it does actually start a new profile.

Huh, I had no idea the <profile> argument to -P is optional (--help does not say), I was always using --ProfileManager instead. Nice quality of life improvement, thanks for the information!

ah well, ironically I had no idea that -P could take a profile-name arg.. I always used it without to trigger the gui .. so I return the thanks

Use -p in your shortcut to firefox and it will show the profile manager on launch, from that you can easily create a new profile or open a new window on existing one.

cli is not good ux

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