Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 212 posts

Re: Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse

#11

Post by bluebarbet »

Profiles are great. I've used them for years. Much better than containers, which separate your data sort-of-but-not-quite. A profile folder has everything. You can copy it, back it up, plug it into a completely new Firefox installation later.

That portability is a killer feature, but scriptability needs to be improved. The manual says you can do:

>`firefox --profile Start with profile at `

But that will not work as expected if you have more than one profile (which is the whole point). At present the only workable solution is to fiddle with a GUI thru `about:profiles` (or `firefox --ProfileManager`) in order to create the profiles and give them all-important UIDs. And then do:

>`firefox -P `

It may seem small, but I've found that this is a serious roadblock. I wish it could be fixed so as to make profiles entirely scriptable.

PS: to be clear, after the futzing with the GUI to create the profiles, my script works (well!) at opening windows in the right profile, this way: (1) Check if the given profile is already launched: `ps -eo args | grep -E ".(firefox).(-P $UID)" | grep -v grep > /dev/null` (2) Do `firefox -P $UID --new-instance $url` if it isn't, and `--new-tab` if it is. Inelegant, but very reliable.

Re: Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse

#13

Post by attendant3446 »

sorcercode wrote: post #2

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 bet…

Profiles were in Firefox for a long time now. It looks like they finally have made a proper UI for it.

Re: Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse

#14

Post by [deleted] »

bluebarbet wrote: post #11

Profiles are great. I've used them for years. Much better than containers, which separate your data sort-of-but-not-quite. A profile folder has everything . You can copy it, back it up, plug it into a completely new Firefox installation later. That portability is a killer feature, but scriptability needs to be improved. The manual says you can do: >`firefox --profile Start with profile at ` But that will not work as…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse

#15

Post by mrb »

What an extremely confusing blog post! I don't understand why it seemingly presents profiles as a new feature? Firefox has had profiles for years. What the heck is new?

I had to click the other link https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management to understand that this is all about simple UI improvements to make it easier to work with existing profiles.

The blog post is more than confusing, it is misleading. HN should link to the support page instead of the blog post.

Re: Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse

#16

Post by conaclos »

bluebarbet wrote: post #11

Profiles are great. I've used them for years. Much better than containers, which separate your data sort-of-but-not-quite. A profile folder has everything . You can copy it, back it up, plug it into a completely new Firefox installation later. That portability is a killer feature, but scriptability needs to be improved. The manual says you can do: >`firefox --profile Start with profile at ` But that will not work as…

Have you tried `firefox --no-remote --profile `?

In my case, I am able to launch several Firefox instances with distinct profiles.

Re: Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse

#17

Post by hobofan »

mrb wrote: post #15

What an extremely confusing blog post! I don't understand why it seemingly presents profiles as a new feature? Firefox has had profiles for years. What the heck is new? I had to click the other link https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management to understand that this is all about simple UI improvements to make it easier to work with existing profiles. The blog post is more than confusing, it is misleading.…

100% agree. It feels like Firefox has had an identical announcement of this as a new feature every second major release for the last ~2 years.

They are seriously dropping the ball here in terms of communication and it just makes Firefox seem stale.

Re: Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse

#19

Post by skeledrew »

Nice. I've been using Tab Groups Manager, and then Simple Tab Groups for years, but have also at times wished for more control and better separation while preserving ease of use (I really don't want to deal with providing CLI args). Hopefully this bridges the gap well.

Re: Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse

#20

Post by bashtoni »

mrb wrote: post #15

What an extremely confusing blog post! I don't understand why it seemingly presents profiles as a new feature? Firefox has had profiles for years. What the heck is new? I had to click the other link https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management to understand that this is all about simple UI improvements to make it easier to work with existing profiles. The blog post is more than confusing, it is misleading.…

It looks like AI slop to me. "Profiles in Firefox aren’t just a way to clean up your tabs. They’re a way to set boundaries, protect your information and make the internet a little calmer." - classic meaningless comparison.
Post reply on HN