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

blog.mozilla.org

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

#161

They should make it a bit more clear they added features that were not there before and what, as it is not clear to me what has changed from before that I tried using them. Apparently it seems better now, but no wonder most commenters do not realise this is about some new features not about the old.

What’s new now? Just the UI for picking profiles? The article contains absolutely no details.

The article links to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management. From my memory of how profiles worked previously it's mostly a fresh coat of paint for things you could do before.

The two most exciting things to me:

1. You can now launch and manage profiles from a menu hidden in the account menu (feels like the wrong place to put it, but shows up for me even though I'm not signed in)

2. Mozilla actually cares about profiles again. The feature felt mostly abandoned before, nearly inaccessible without command line flags or the very bare-bones and ugly about:profiles

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

#162
post #129
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,…

Is there a command line flag that opens the url in a chromeless window for Firefox, so that it works like a PWA?

I haven't messed with Firefox's PWA feature/taskbar-tabs[1] but it seems like under the hood it's just using shortcuts so you're probably looking for -taskbar-tab

This redditor looks like he's doing close to what you're asking with the caveat of needing an entry in taskbartabs.json to use -taskbar-tab (and maybe Windows OS only) [2]

I don't think it's completely chromeless but you can probably hide everything via custom CSS:

ctrl+shift+i (dev tools) -> f1 (settings)

check advanced settings:

  enable browser chrome and add-on debugging  

  enable remote debugging  
ctrl+shift+alt+i (browser dev tools)

Find element IDs or class names and try out CSS rules to your heart's content.

Set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets = true and put your changes in Firefox/Profiles/$profilename/chrome/userChrome.css.

Remember to turn off the advanced settings when you're done.

[1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/t...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ljidwp/progressiv...

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

#163

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…

Another roadblock that I've encountered is moving a tab between profiles. For a multitude of reasons, foremost between them research, I would often come across a tab that I know would be useful for one of my other research subjects. If the profile in question is closed, there is too much friction to open it, copy the url, paste into a new tab, then close the profile again.

A single "Send to profile" option would be such a boon to productivity.

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

#164
post #76

Here is my wishlist with respect to browser profiles and containers. While the chances that I'll get them are low, I hope it inspires people to think bigger a bit more. It may be too hard on the current generation of web engines, but perhaps the next generation can plan better in advance. We're doing profiles and containers wrong. There are numerous other free software that demonstrate better examples. Why do we have…

> We're doing profiles and containers wrong. There are numerous other free software that demonstrate better examples. Profiles are about separating Settings and user history, not for security isolation. If you want to do that use the OS? > Today we have full-window pages with multiple pages supported by tabs. But those who use browsers for anything serious, besides watching cat videos or doom scrolling on social medi…

> Profiles are about separating Settings and user history, not for security isolation.

Where does it say that? Using profiles is currently like using different browsers altogether. How does that preclude security isolation? All that aside, how did you reach the conclusion if you read what I wrote? I was talking about a single unified mechanism to consolidate the various types of isolations, security or not, in an easily understandablr manner. There are also some very annoying papercuts that I believe will be solved with that.

> If you want to do that use the OS?

> Why should the browser implement a window manager, when the window manager already exists?

If you haven't noticed, the browser has grown in the past quarter of a century into a full-fledged OS-level platform with a complex GUI, a few dozen technologies, equally numerous APIs, a decent sandbox and an entire VM to run applications written in any of a few dozen programming languages. It's easier to write a small OS compared to a small browser. Implementing window managers inside a browser is not very hard or unusual. Some browsers do it in their main UI too. I was suggesting an extension of that concept. If it can improve the UX of a browser, why insist on gatekeeping it to the OS window manager?

> What stops you from putting two tabs side-by-side right now?

Where have you ever seen that done satisfactorily? Forget the numerous bars and panels all over the place that take up so much space. When have you ever been able to share information seamlessly like in a single window? It's so frustrating that it's a joke as a solution.

> You know, that you can put the menubar into the OS panel?

On which platform? How many WMs/DEs you know offer that facility? Unlike on MacOS where you can do that, window managers have a few dozen menu bars that aren't even compatible with each other. How many OS panels will each browser have to integrate with? Here instead, I'm suggesting the use of a technology that's already there - the web engine. In fact, that's how most browsers implement their main UI already. But it's not quite well integrated with the engine, at least in Firefox. My suggestion was to remove that limitation. You're objecting to something that's already there.

If you need something to be upset about browsers, there are plenty of egregious changes being pushed down the throats of the users. In contrast, I wasn't suggesting anything that the user has to accept without questions. It's also something that can be done with the building blocks already available. In fact, the changes you object to are already being partially implemented by many projects and are well-received by users as far as I can see. If we are this cynical about trying out great ideas from other platforms, what sort of progress are we expecting anyway?

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

#165
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

there's an old '-P' flag that shows a small ui see https://imgur.com/a/Tmt3oEL

Huh, I had no idea the argument to -P is optional (--help does not say), I was always using --ProfileManager instead. Nice quality of life improvement, thanks for the information!

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

#166
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.

For Win 10, I set this up a while ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy but the key was the `taskbar.grouping.useprofile true` setting. I think after that's set Firefox and Windows did some AUMID shenanigans on profile launch.

I just made a new profile as a test and this is what I did:

  ...firefox.exe" -P -> create a new profile (ie. "newprofilename")
  
   about:config set `taskbar.grouping.useprofile = true` (when I originally did this for many profiles I believe I copied prefs.js that already had it set)  

   close and reopen that profile instance. I used ...firefox.exe" -P "newprofilename" but any method of launching the profile should work. It should now be in a separate taskbar group.  

  Pin that new group to taskbar. Also modify its shortcut target to add -P "newprofilename"  

  Now you're done.  
Normally I also renamed the pinned shortcut to something sane and then I changed the icon. I took the normal Firefox icon (I think w/ GIMP) and just messed with the colors via saturation or something so it was easy to tell the difference. I remember changing the shortcut icon had some headache but I sadly didn't write notes.

Also, I didn't set grouping.useprofile on all my profiles, just the profiles I wanted separately pinned on my taskbar. My default profile is pinned normally without grouping.useprofile set.

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's an old '-P' flag that shows a small ui see https://imgur.com/a/Tmt3oEL

Huh, I had no idea the argument to -P is optional (--help does not say), I was always using --ProfileManager instead. Nice quality of life improvement, thanks for the information!

ah well, ironically I had no idea that -P could take a profile-name arg.. I always used it without to trigger the gui .. so I return the thanks

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

#168

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…

> 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…

Today is the day I no longer need to open a private browser to manage Entra. Thank you stranger, thank you very much

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

#169

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…

This combined with "Always Open Site in Container", that pins a site to a specific container makes it almost invisible to me when moving between profiles. I have several sites I only want to open with specific profiles and this workflow is a pain with Chrome. (click link with wrong profile, copy url, close tab, open a new browser, select profile, paste url, open site with correct profile.)

I really like the "Always Open Site in Container" along with "Limit to Designated Sites" once it's set up, but I wish there was a way to make it accept wildcards otherwise I have to manually add localhost:8080, localhost:8081, etc. Manually adding a dozen or more becomes painful.

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This combined with "Always Open Site in Container", that pins a site to a specific container makes it almost invisible to me when moving between profiles. I have several sites I only want to open with specific profiles and this workflow is a pain with Chrome. (click link with wrong profile, copy url, close tab, open a new browser, select profile, paste url, open site with correct profile.)

I really like the "Always Open Site in Container" along with "Limit to Designated Sites" once it's set up, but I wish there was a way to make it accept wildcards otherwise I have to manually add localhost:8080, localhost:8081, etc. Manually adding a dozen or more becomes painful.

Does the Containerise extension do what you want? I've used it in the past for wildcard subdomains but not for ports.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise/

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