for the most part I've been using Firefox containers and loving that life of getting the same benefits without having to create separate profiles.
but it's nice to see this finally get into Firefox because there are still a lot of folks who also want to maintain things like browser bookmarks, passwords etc in a separate profile. that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers (which IMHO is slightly better than having to manage multiple profiles)
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Containers are nice, but they are, as you said, not as powerful as the new profiles system (which is, incidentally, almost as easy to use as containers now that we can switch between them right in the UI).
At this time there are essentially three levels of indirection: "legacy" profiles -> new profiles -> containers, that is we can have multiple legacy profiles with each having multiple new profiles, each with an independent group of containers in them.
To choose a legacy profile, use the -P CLI option (with or without a profile name). Once firefox starts, you can switch between the new profiles stored inside the current legacy one using the new UI.
> that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers
Actually, I have wanted better profile support for a while to segregate addons. There are plenty of addons that I want to use occasionally that require full data access. I generally do trust them, but even so, I keep these in a separate profile just in case. That is something that can't be done with containers.
> There are plenty of addons that I want to use occasionally that require full data access. I generally do trust them...
Seconded, except I don't trust most add-ons and don't want to have to trust them.
I want an easy way to launch a disposable browser session in any browser, totally isolated, with add-ons chosen (and downloaded) at launch time, and then erased of with the rest of the session when its last open page is closed.
I think Firefox focus does that on android, I'm sure there's a way to get the same result on a desktop with some flags and pointing to a config file (or a read only profile folder maybe?)
AFAIK Firefox Focus doesn't have extensions at all:( Although yes, it effectively has only private/incognito sessions that are erased when you close the app.
Beyond its UI having basically been frozen since Netscape Navigator 4-ish modulo XUL shenanigans?
The new Profile Manager (that doesn't yet entirely replace the old one, both exist side-by-side for the moment) uses icons and colors to better differentiate profiles at a glance.
Additionally links to the new Profile Manager are now in the Account menu and feel a bit more like an "account chooser" (comparable to Chrome's experience, especially) and lot less like a power user feature hidden behind a page address that people might not know ("about:profiles").
That's what I fear happening, and I will not like it.
> comparable to Chrome's experience
If I wanted to have "Chrome's experience" I would have used Chrome. Profiles is one way Firefox has been vastly better. Selecting the last used Profile is one press on Enter on startup and selecting a different one is a matter of pressing up/down a few times and pressing Enter or typing the first few (unique) characters of the profile name and pressing Enter. I can't think of a UI that would be faster, I think this has already reached the maximum UX for decades. This all works nicely, because it looks, feels and behaves like a native window (don't know if it is).
> lot less like a power user feature hidden behind a page address that people might not know ("about:profiles").
Why is everyone comparing it to the "hidden debug site" instead of the old profiles UI? Yeah no shit, about:profiles is not discoverable to the average user, much like all the other about: pages, but why would anyone not debugging the browser use it over the normal profiles UI?
> Beyond its UI having basically been frozen since Netscape Navigator 4-ish modulo XUL shenanigans?
I don't think this is a bad thing. I vastly prefer native(?-like) UI, way more over yet another Metro-UI clone with sluggish behaviour and no keyboard bindings.
> Why is everyone comparing it to the "hidden debug site" instead of the old profiles UI? Yeah no shit, about:profiles is not discoverable to the average user, much like all the other about: pages, but why would anyone not debugging the browser use it over the normal profiles UI?
"about:profiles" wasn't a debug view, it was the "normal" profiles UI; it was the only way to get to the ProfileManager without closing Firefox and reopening it with a CLI flag. For most of its life in Firefox it never had a menu item or toolbar button.
> I vastly prefer native(?-like) UI, way more over yet another Metro-UI clone with sluggish behaviour and no keyboard bindings.
Firefox has never used native controls. They were "XUL" controls for a long while, but that had several major revisions. (Netscape had some XUL predecessors, probably some port or fork of a Unix toolkit like Qt or Tk?) But the trick to XUL was it was always the same renderer as HTML for the most part. Then in the somewhat controversial at the time decision to kill off XUL Firefox moved to just HTML everywhere.
The new Profile Manager seemed to have keyboard bindings and didn't feel sluggish to me. The one loan complaint with it is that it doesn't have a way yet to surface profiles made before using the new Manager, but I assume that will come with time and expect that's one of the things to fix before the new one replaces the old one.
> "about:profiles" wasn't a debug view, it was the "normal" profiles UI; it was the only way to get to the ProfileManager without closing Firefox and reopening it with a CLI flag. For most of its life in Firefox it never had a menu item or toolbar button.
I did not knew that. I have used the ProfileManager for years and have not know of "about:profiles". Where is even the button on that page to launch the ProfileManager? I only see options to launch a specific profile or Restart with or without Add-Ons. This doesn't really look like the official page to handle Profiles and more like an afterthought.
Also about:profiles currently tells me this, because I started another profile:
> About Profiles
> Another copy of Firefox has made changes to profiles. You must restart Firefox before making more changes.
This page helps you to manage your profiles. Each profile is a separate world which contains separate history, bookmarks, settings and add-ons.
What kind of useless behaviour is that? I can't open another profile as soon as another profile was opened? Honestly the claim, that this is supposed to be the primary interface to Profiles doesn't sound believable. This seems to be more something like a diagnostic tool/power user tool to access half-way internals in the same spirit as about:processes or other about: pages.
Also opening the Profiles Manager through some other Firefox instance seems a bit pointless to me, because you normally use Profiles to have process isolation and prevent one frozen Firefox instance from blocking another to start.
> it was the only way to get to the ProfileManager without closing Firefox
You can open the Profiles Manager without closing Firefox?
> For most of its life in Firefox it never had a menu item or toolbar button.
That seems to be an easy change that doesn't need redesigning the Profile mechanism.
> Firefox has never used native controls.
I suspected that, that's why I added a question mark and "-like". I ment that it feels, behaves and conforms like a native tool and is really usable and integrated.
Also are you sure about that? Because when I change my GTK+/GNOME theme, it also instantly changes the layout, icons, colors, etc. in the Profile Manager as well as in the other Firefox Chrome at runtime. Normally only GTK+ programs do that, not even KDE programs do it and certainly not some customly rolled UI toolkit. For example programs like Google Chrome(ium) give a shit about the OS theme. So if Firefox really uses some self-made UI toolkit, than they did a REALLY good job, because it looks and behaves exactly like all the other GTK+ programs. But I always thought that Firefox uses a GTK+ fork.
but it's nice to see this finally get into Firefox because there are still a lot of folks who also want to maintain things like browser bookmarks, passwords etc in a separate profile. that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers (which IMHO is slightly better than having to manage multiple profiles)