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

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

#51

Post by Yaina »

celsoazevedo wrote: post #48
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…

> A profile folder has everything. You can copy it, back it up, plug it into a completely new Firefox installation later. These new profiles seem to be slightly different from the old ones? [edit: ignore most of the stuff below, see replies] The new UI doesn't show your other regular profiles and when you create a new profile via the new UI, it also doesn't create a separate profile folder (it's part of your active p…

It still creates separate folders but you're right that about:profiles seems to treat them as the same.

When you open about:profiles in both your "new" profiles, you can see that even though it has the same name, the path changes.

So I think in effect they still behave like profiles before, just with some extra logic on top so they have names, icons and so on.

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

#52

Post by celsoazevedo »

xenophonf wrote: post #42

Firefox profiles suck. Their UX is so bad. Containers are better but still have their issues. I use Containerise plus Cookie AutoDelete plus Temporary Containers to give me what is effectively per-tab private browsing. The major downside is that I have to copy containers.json (which enumerates all of the dedicated containers I have defined, e.g., for Facebook), my Containerise rules (which automatically puts certain…

> Firefox profiles suck. Their UX is so bad.

That's what these changes aim to fix. You're getting a Chromium-like profile switcher/manager.

> Containers are better

Containers are very good... for container stuff. Profiles allow us to have different bookmarks, settings, extensions, themes, etc. Different tools for different jobs. I use both!

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

#53

Post by jsrcout »

Firefox profiles have worked really well for me for years. I only have two complaints. (a) I like to configure my tools, and setting prefs via user.js has just never really worked - anything there is ignored. Probably it's just because of my particular setup, but I eventually gave up on it. (b) It would be super nice if profiles could [edit:] share common prefs. I certainly don't expect the developers to make it a feature, and it seems like fixing (a) and using symlinks would do it. But overall, yeah profiles work great.

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

#54

Post by chrisweekly »

jsrcout wrote: post #53

Firefox profiles have worked really well for me for years. I only have two complaints. (a) I like to configure my tools, and setting prefs via user.js has just never really worked - anything there is ignored. Probably it's just because of my particular setup, but I eventually gave up on it. (b) It would be super nice if profiles could [edit:] share common prefs. I certainly don't expect the developers to make it a fe…

> "if profiles could common prefs"

sorry I couldn't quite parse this

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

#56

Post by celsoazevedo »

Yaina wrote: post #51
celsoazevedo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A profile folder has everything. You can copy it, back it up, plug it into a completely new Firefox installation later. These new profiles seem to be slightly different from the old ones? [edit: ignore most of the stuff below, see replies] The new UI doesn't show your other regular profiles and when you create a new profile via the new UI, it also doesn't create a separate profile folder (it's part of your active p…

It still creates separate folders but you're right that about:profiles seems to treat them as the same. When you open about:profiles in both your "new" profiles, you can see that even though it has the same name, the path changes. So I think in effect they still behave like profiles before, just with some extra logic on top so they have names, icons and so on.

You're right. For some reason I couldn't see the folders being created, but after restarting Firefox (about:profiles required me to do after creating profiles with the new UI), they are created.

Do you know if there's any way to have old profiles showing on this new UI?

Edit: They seem to be working on this:

- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1996240

- https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D270525

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

#58

Post by kiwijamo »

fa3556 wrote: post #44
jmakov wrote: post #22

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

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

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?

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

#59

Post by miki_oomiri »

uniqueuid wrote: post #5

Profiles have always been great, but it's kind of unfortunate that this feature seems to be locked behind a sign-in (the link in the article describes the UI as being in the profile menu). I mean, I've been using about:profiles for ages, but it would definitely be nice to have a bit more polish (e.g. every now and again I forget that a newly created profile is automatically promoted to default) [edit] well seems I ha…

It blows my mind.

I can't have profile without having a "Sign In" button in my toolbar. Mozilla… please. How is it possible, to ship a feature and do that…

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

#60

Post by BrenBarn »

I've used profiles for a long time, but they have some annoyances.

One thing I really want is a comprehensive system for transferring/syncing only certain data between profiles. Profiles contain some data that is specific to, well, a particular browsing profile (like open tabs), but also data that is really more specific to me as a person (like font preferences). And then each extension can have its own settings or data that I may or may not want to transfer. I always have to look up old articles on Mozilla wiki and hope they're still accurate when I want to transfer certain data/settings between profiles while neither nuking everything nor copying everything. It would be great to have a sort of "data browser" that let me pick and choose certain data and then create a new profile from that.

The other disappointing thing to me is how they talk about profiles (and container tabs) as related to different usage patterns like work, home, etc. I mean, yeah, that's cool, but what I really want (certainly from container tabs, sometimes from profiles as well) is site isolation. I don't just want one profile for my work Gmail and another for my personal Gmail. I want one container tab for "everything Google", isolated from the rest, to minimize Google's tracking. But, like I said above, I still want all my personal preferences uniform across these profiles/containers.

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