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

141–150 of 212 posts

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

#141

Post by jobigoud »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #6

Glad to see improvements here -- switching between profiles has always been a weak spot for Firefox!

I don't understand some of these comments. Start firefox, pick profile, opens a window in the selected profile.

The only weirdness is when you have multiple windows of different profiles opened at the same time and you open a link from a different application it may open it in the last used window which may not be the one you wanted. But then you can of course just drag and drop the tab from one window to the other.

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

#143

Post by jobigoud »

Scipio_Afri wrote: post #89

Would really be great to move windows or tab groups between different profiles; Edge offers this. Sometimes you don't realize what profile you're in and you start doing stuff in your personal profile that doesn't fit there. With firefox right now there is no way to select and move any tabs, tab groups or windows to the profile that is best suited for those links.

I do it all the time I'm not sure what you are talking about.

I use Tree Style Tabs extension (obviously), so maybe the feature is coming from there?

You can definitely drag and drop a tab from one window to another, target window can be in a different profile.

You can select multiple tabs with SHIFT and then drag and drop them to the other window, no problem.

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

#144

Post by jobigoud »

Ingon wrote: post #70

Been using profiles for some years now and they are great. I usually start with the default profile, then navigate to "about:profiles" to open all I need. Thanks to profiles, when my manjaro install broke, I migrated to NixOS and all my browsing sessions were ready to use the way I left them. Getting a dedicated, more integrated UI for managing profile will be great. The one thing I'm missing is "incognito" profiles…

> I usually start with the default profile, then navigate to "about:profiles" to open all I need.

Just add -p in the shortcut properties to start on the profile manager.

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

#145

Post by jobigoud »

philip-b wrote: post #84

So, can I make it that when I click a URL in another program, Firefox would ask me which profile to use?

For me that's how it works unless I already have a Firefox window opened. If I have multiple windows of different profiles already open (which happens all the time) it may add it to the wrong one, so I sometimes need to drag and drop the tab between the windows.

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

#146

Post by jobigoud »

ryukoposting wrote: post #40

Profiles rock. When I was WFH I had a work profile and a personal profile. Password manager synced across the two profiles, really slick experience honestly. I do wish you could change sync settings on a per-profile basis though.

You can change sync settings on a per-profile basis. I have 6 profiles, 4 of which I synchronize between different computers. They use different sync accounts. So for example on my personal profile I sync the passwords but not on the work profile.

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

#147

Post by pantulis »

jxf wrote: post #131
freehorse wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Much better than containers, which separate your data sort-of-but-not-quite What is better depends on the use case. For me, containers are magic, because I can be logged into eg 2-3 different microsoft accounts simultaneously in the same window. With profiles or other browsers I would need to open a different window for each, which would be unnecessary and impractical. This is extremely convenient for me, container…

Agree, containers are exactly what I want and I use them all the time. Profiles are too much isolation, like installing separate VMs to run processes in a completely isolated way when something like Docker is fine.

The key element here is switching windows across profiles. Safari almost gets this right but fails in the UI imho. Edge has "workspaces" that could almost work but they don't provide isolation.

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

#148

Post by dizhn »

degamad wrote: post #32
happymellon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers But thats a massive difference. I have work profiles and a personal profile. I have password manager profiles for clients (clients will provide their own PM logins to segregate their access) which are different between them, and having separate profiles is huge. Containers are great, especially for crappy websites that use your sessions for tracking whic…

You've hit on the relevant distinction: user context vs system context. I use containers to separate system context (partitioning cookies and site data) while remaining in the same user context (e.g. "personal browsing"). I use profiles for when I need different user contexts (different bookmarks and frequently used sites for different clients or projects). When only one tool is available, you are limited by the cons…

Cookies can already be partitioned. I am not sure if it's default but at the very least it's a config flag. It's called site isolation. I have seen Firefox people say containers kind of become unnecessary with this in place in terms of privacy but they kind of have an opaque whitelist to get some things to work. The biggest example is google properties.

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

#149

Post by pantulis »

degamad wrote: post #32
happymellon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers But thats a massive difference. I have work profiles and a personal profile. I have password manager profiles for clients (clients will provide their own PM logins to segregate their access) which are different between them, and having separate profiles is huge. Containers are great, especially for crappy websites that use your sessions for tracking whic…

You've hit on the relevant distinction: user context vs system context. I use containers to separate system context (partitioning cookies and site data) while remaining in the same user context (e.g. "personal browsing"). I use profiles for when I need different user contexts (different bookmarks and frequently used sites for different clients or projects). When only one tool is available, you are limited by the cons…

> I use profiles for when I need different user contexts (different bookmarks and frequently used sites for different clients or projects).

This is the part where the new Firefox profiles fall short. I just checked and cannot create two separate profiles with the same email address. So it's not possible tohave different profiles for different _projects_ at work, for example.

Containers are the way to go with this, but then they are not exactly intuitive. Arc got this right and Zen is showing a lot of promise.

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

#150

Post by rswail »

ghostly_s wrote: post #24
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…

Tried containers when it was released but found it very inconvenient to manage. If I understand this solution doesn't even let you have two profiles open at once? That's even less useful imho. edit: I use Simple Tab Groups which is far more featureful - "Send tab to [group/container/etc]" for example is table stakes.

I have 3 different profiles, one for each of my current customers and one personal.

Within the customer profiles, I have containers for things like different AWS accounts (although AWS now has that as part of the console), I can have logins to test systems and production systems etc.

The automation of containers is good too, tied to URLs.

Post reply on HN