I thought it had had that for twenty years?
Yeah I don’t know why profiles itself are being mentioned as a new thing. What’s new is the more convenient interface for them
you don’t like about:profiles?
Show of Hands:
Who’s heard of “about:profiles”?
🦗🦗🦗
Wait till you hear about:about
For some reason I read that in a Canadian accent in my head.
“aboot aboot”
Feels super strange to read this. They had profiles for what, decades now? It just required a simple command line flag.
I mean, this is better, but… Yeah.
Impressive that theyre finally adding a feature that ive already been using. Makes you wonder how they do that
A feature that has been present for 20 years, but never exposed in the interface. Truly magical.
Quite. It’s how I’ve been watching YouTube ad-free for ages.
This features great if you habe two people who use a device. I have it on the steamdeck in my lounge and its nice for people to be able to open Firefox and have all their accounts saved and their extensions
I this a reskin of about:profiles?
I think containers (that Firefox already has) are a much better way to handle this. Profiles, art least the way they are implemented on chrome, feels like a massive downgrade.
It depends on how much separation you need. If you want different bookmarks, history, or settings per, then I believe you need profiles to make that happen.
also different addons, and different configuration for addons etc
Why would I use this when I have Firefox containers?
It’s the same as about:profiles
Just an easy way to separate people’s browsing histories, cookes, bookmarks, etc I guess. And you can have them sync independently as well. For if other people want to use the same computer
That makes sense. The bookmarks and settings kinda made everything fit better in my head, thanks!
separate settings, separate addons, separate about prefs. also for when the PC is used by more than one person but there is only one user account
Ok this is handy ngl. I’ve forgotten about the shared family compute scenario
I love containers, but it has a pretty frustrating and unfriendly ui. If something else allowed sorting and categorizing, I think that’d be an upgrade.
Fair, I just always felt containers were better than profiles, cause each tab is a profile now. The tooling does need improvement, I still get lost when trying to access some configs for it
It’s great having a separate profile for when you tell bbc iPlayer you have a tv licence.
But can’t containers do that? Maybe I’m missing something?
Multiple accounts on the same websites with different cookies for each one.
That’s what containers do.
This should have been a feature 10 years ago
It was.
It wasn’t. It was a hidden feature.
Is a hidden feature still a feature?
I’ve been using this daily for many years. It’s behind a CLI flag, is that hidden ?
The screeshots shows functionality that the current profile/profile launch UI already has. Choose, create, ask on startup.
Right now it’s hidden behind a startup parameter. But honestly, I would prefer a UI between the current one and the new one. That screenshot looks like it would reduce usability through big spacing and suboptimal alignment. At least judging by my preferences.
I guess adding a picture is nice. But does it have to be that huge and prominent?
This only works on Windows. For Macs and maybe Linux, you have to run this command to bring up a different profile:
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -p
As best I can tell, there’s no way to make this into a shortcut that you could just click on. This change will be good and allow me to launch them without invoking that command in terminal several times after rebooting my computer.
On Mac:
If you want an icon you can double click on your desktop, you can put you command in a file with the extension “.command” and mark it as executable. Double clicking it will run the content as a shell script in Terminal.
If you want something that can be put into the Dock, use the Script Editor application that comes with macOS to create a new AppleScript script. Type
do shell script "<firefox command here>"then find Export in the menu. Instead of Script, choose export to Application and check Run Only. This will give you an application you can put in the Dock.If you want to use Shortcuts, you can use the Run Shell Script action in Shortcuts too.
Finally, if you want something that opens multiple firefoxes at once, chain multiple firefox invocations together on one line separated by an ampersand. There is an option you have to use (–new-instance I think?) to make Firefox actually start a complete new instance.
You’ve always been able to navigate to
about:profilesas wellOn Windows, I had two shortcuts–one each for a profile. It became my workflow and annoyed me when I couldn’t do that on a Mac. I didn’t always want my work profile to open by mistake, check into systems, etc. when I only wanted the home one, for instance.
Why couldn’t you do that on a Mac? You can edit the shortcut path and add the flags and parameters there.
I was never able to figure a way to do this. I could link to the executable but not modify the shortcut to allow for flags.
The “Use the selected profile without asking at startup” checkbox in the dialog is not there on mac?
I hadn’t known that this was a method. My entire workflow has been changed.
