How to Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Firefox

#11

Post by lmz » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 11:53 AM UTC

akazantsev wrote: post #5

Firefox has no profiles. It has a bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.

It definitely has "profiles" as in the entire set of settings/ preferences/history[1]. Whether or not they are usable as a replacement for Chrome's however...

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

Re: How to Firefox

#12

Post by VerdisQuo5678 » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 11:53 AM UTC

akazantsev wrote: post #5

Firefox has no profiles. It has a bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.

firefox has had profiles for years, maybe decades its hidden in about:profiles i guess they're just adding a proper ui now

Re: How to Firefox

#13

Post by thoroughburro » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 11:55 AM UTC

elashri wrote: post #8

thoroughburro wrote: post #2

> Here’s something the iPhone isn’t getting anytime soon: honest-to-god browser extensions that you use on your desktop, also on your phone. This convinces me the author is not knowledgeable about current browser capabilities. They probably haven’t tried anything but Firefox in a long time. Orion runs desktop (Firefox) extensions on iOS, and is in many ways a breath of fresh air. Instead of parroting “all iOS browser…

While orion is good option, it is not there yet in terms of comparison with Firefox on Android. Many of the extensions will install but will not actually work. Even uBlock origin will have problems. Also it is common that an update will make the browser crash very often (happened with few updates). Also they don't provide a list of APIs they support and it is not open source (although they said they will but at this…

But you agree the quote I responded to was incorrect, right?

Re: How to Firefox

#14

Post by paavope » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 11:55 AM UTC

akazantsev wrote: post #5

Firefox has no profiles. It has a bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.

I use profiles on Firefox daily and they work fine

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

Re: How to Firefox

#15

Post by elashri » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 11:55 AM UTC

akazantsev wrote: post #5

Firefox has no profiles. It has a bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.

> Firefox has no profiles

That is not true [1]. Firefox has profiles and while you can argue that their UX is worse than chrome but that doesn't mean it does not have profiles.

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

Re: How to Firefox

#16

Post by MatejKafka » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 11:56 AM UTC

akazantsev wrote: post #5

Firefox has no profiles. It has a bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.

Containers feel like a much more useful feature to me than profiles - I don't wanna open a new window for each website that I want to isolate from my main session, but with containers, it's trivial.

Re: How to Firefox

#17

Post by Propelloni » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 11:57 AM UTC

thoroughburro wrote: post #10

stby wrote: post #4

The article implies that tabs, bookmarks, passwords can only be synchronised between Firefox installations and not with Zen or Libre (I assume this refers to LibreWolf?), but at least Zen can be connected to the Mozilla account and synchronises everything with the other connected Firefox, Firefox for Android, ... installations.

LibreWolf also connects and syncs seamlessly to Firefox Accounts.

Same for Waterfox.

Re: How to Firefox

#18

Post by iamkonstantin » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 11:57 AM UTC

I tried Firefox just a few days ago, but it didn't work out. I just missed too many things out of the box. My main browser is Vivaldi (so all the chromium goodies + privacy + made in EU). Safari comes in as a close second, I tend to use it on the go because it syncs well with my Mac and Apple throttles any other browser on iOS.

Re: How to Firefox

#19

Post by pta2002 » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 11:58 AM UTC

akazantsev wrote: post #5

Firefox has no profiles. It has a bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.

This is weird to me because I so much prefer Firefox's per-tab containers to having to use separate windows for profiles. I wish chrome had something like it.

Re: How to Firefox

#20

Post by elashri » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 11:59 AM UTC

thoroughburro wrote: post #13

elashri wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While orion is good option, it is not there yet in terms of comparison with Firefox on Android. Many of the extensions will install but will not actually work. Even uBlock origin will have problems. Also it is common that an update will make the browser crash very often (happened with few updates). Also they don't provide a list of APIs they support and it is not open source (although they said they will but at this…

But you agree the quote I responded to was incorrect, right?

Orion is based on WebKit, that's usually what people mean when they say it is all safari. So it is technically correct but orion approach ia to try to implement web extensions API in WebKit. Otherwise, apple wouldn't have allowed orion on App Store because the requirement is not to use any other engines (holding off to see what EU DMA effect would have).