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

blog.mozilla.org

101–110 of 212 posts

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

#101

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…

Unfortunately I don't think you can just transfer willy nilly between firefox versions, at a certain point downgrades don't work, and I'm just trying to figure out where that point is (can you move to ESR for example)

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

#102
post #41

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…

In Windows 10 I have shortcuts pinned to my taskbar that are just > ...firefox.exe" -P "profilename" and then `taskbar.grouping.useprofile true` so only windows from the same profile are grouped together and some custom recolored Firefox icons for those pinned shortcuts and custom per-profile userChrome.css styling (#TabsToolbar background-color) for easy visual differentiation of a window's profile. For Windows 10,…

Cannot get this to work with Win11, whose taskbar won't accept the same program pinned twice. Even not, after creating two shortcuts.

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

#103
post #64
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An idea we'll have to start getting used to is that people who read enough of the slop might begin to emulate it without necessarily meaning to. The homogeneity will be contagious.

I still don't quite understand where ChatGPT and its pals learned this. Sure, all these PR copywriters are notoriously bad at writing, but still, I don't think I often met all this crap in many texts before. I mean, if I did, I wouldn't be noticing it now as that ChatGPT style . So why does it write like that? Is it even how Anthropic models write as well (never used them)? Is it some OpenAI RL artifact, or is it som…

I think the idiom by itself is good, and that could be the reason why LLMs prefer it: a hypothetical test groups liked it.

The problem comes from that LLM prefers it way too often.

And I suppose it would be a bit difficult to change it to actually be good: even if it just used it once per session, it might still choose to use it on every session, as it cannot see how much an idiom has been used in other ones.

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

#104

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…

Unfortunately I don't think you can just transfer willy nilly between firefox versions, at a certain point downgrades don't work, and I'm just trying to figure out where that point is (can you move to ESR for example)

My script uses `firefox-esr --allow-downgrade` for exactly that reason. It worked in my case.

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

#105
post #41

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…

In Windows 10 I have shortcuts pinned to my taskbar that are just > ...firefox.exe" -P "profilename" and then `taskbar.grouping.useprofile true` so only windows from the same profile are grouped together and some custom recolored Firefox icons for those pinned shortcuts and custom per-profile userChrome.css styling (#TabsToolbar background-color) for easy visual differentiation of a window's profile. For Windows 10,…

>from terminal [opening URLs in instances using profile paths] works exactly as expected regardless of how many profile instances are currently running or their state.

That's interesting. It didn't work a couple of years ago, perhaps it's been fixed.

Still leaves that initial GUI profile setup.

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

#106
post #57

So… what's changing? Profiles have been there for decade(s), is it just an alternative UI for folks who were unable to run firefox -p, or is there anything more substantial?

Seems that there's no news. But it's great opportunity for profile users to exchange tips and gripe about missing features.

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

#107
post #102
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Windows 10 I have shortcuts pinned to my taskbar that are just > ...firefox.exe" -P "profilename" and then `taskbar.grouping.useprofile true` so only windows from the same profile are grouped together and some custom recolored Firefox icons for those pinned shortcuts and custom per-profile userChrome.css styling (#TabsToolbar background-color) for easy visual differentiation of a window's profile. For Windows 10,…

Cannot get this to work with Win11, whose taskbar won't accept the same program pinned twice. Even not, after creating two shortcuts.

Weird this works for Edge with two different profiles.

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

#109

If you have the luxury, switch to different OS user accounts. mr_shopping for online buying, mr_games for games, .. mr_rascal for you know what. The attack surface isn't any different, but the blast radius might be.

At this point better going directly with Qubes OS, where each program is a separated VM, no?
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