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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

#171

Post by ibejoeb »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #154
freehorse wrote: post #125

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.

Still difficult to tell for me. I enabled `browser.profiles.enabled` and now there's Profiles in the hamburger menu. However, it only shows a default profile. It does not show any other existing profiles.

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

#172

Post by Anthony-G »

x0x0 wrote: post #80
Anthony-G wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After shutting down Firefox and restarting, I tried the new profile manager UI just now and also thought I had lost my existing profile. Luckily, it was still available from the hamburger menu (just below the “Synchronise all your devices” option) and I was able to switch back to it (with all my existing bookmarks, containers and extensions).

I'm glad you found yours, but mine was gone. I went spelunking through the profiles directory and it was nowhere to be found. I had to pull it from backups.

Ah. Sorry to hear that. That's very annoying frustrating but I'm glad you were able to restore from backup.

I found it confusing that there are now two different sets of profiles and had panicked at first when my original profile was apparently gone.

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

#173

Post by eduction »

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

I don't have it on 144.0.2 on mac in either of those places, just as a datapoint

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

#174

Post by droningparrot »

The confusing part of this is there are now two distinct kinds of profiles: the old profiles that you create through about:profiles and the new profiles that you create in this profile switcher, which appear to be nested within the old profile

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

#175

Post by jimangel2001 »

jobigoud wrote: post #135
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

Use -p in your shortcut to firefox and it will show the profile manager on launch, from that you can easily create a new profile or open a new window on existing one.

cli is not good ux

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

#176

Post by [deleted] »

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.…

[deleted]

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

#177

Post by jjice »

eduction wrote: post #173
fa3556 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't have it on 144.0.2 on mac in either of those places, just as a datapoint

I'm on 144.0.2 on MacOS and I do have it. Under the hamburger menu in the upper right and near the top of the list. Never set up a profile on this machine before, so maybe that could be related?

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

#178

Post by floralhangnail »

joe5150 wrote: post #170
floralhangnail wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I have come across that one, but not having the "trusted" badge in the extension store has usually been a hard pass for me. I might reconsider.

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

#179

Post by jamesgeck0 »

freehorse wrote: post #124
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…

> 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…

My biggest struggle with containers is that I constantly accidentally shift out of them without noticing. I never remember that the default "new tab" keyboard shortcut doesn't respect the current container.

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

#180

Post by WorldMaker »

1718627440 wrote: post #115
attendant3446 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's wrong with the existing ProfileManager?

Beyond its UI having basically been frozen since Netscape Navigator 4-ish modulo XUL shenanigans?

The new Profile Manager (that doesn't yet entirely replace the old one, both exist side-by-side for the moment) uses icons and colors to better differentiate profiles at a glance.

Additionally links to the new Profile Manager are now in the Account menu and feel a bit more like an "account chooser" (comparable to Chrome's experience, especially) and lot less like a power user feature hidden behind a page address that people might not know ("about:profiles").

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