The real gem of Firefox is Containers. No other browser has something like this. It's something critically missing from Chrome. I don't mean "Just create a private window", I mean being able to create 1 + infinitely many profiles/containers. Firefox has an extension called Temporary Containers that makes this better: Every new tab is a temporary, ephemeral container. By default I get isolation. I have it configured so if I hold Ctrl and click a link it will open in the same existing container (in a new tab). If I want sessions to "join" I can do that, but I get defense/privacy by default.
There's another called Proxy Containers so I can have separate tabs taking separate paths out.
There are many benefits to Chrome and it's dev tools, and I respect the Firefox mission more for all the shit Mozilla has done. But I'm bound to Firefox regardless of the pros and cons because it's the only browser that can do this.
I had to do a minor presentation a few days ago, involving logging into several different AWS accounts. The main content of my presentation went absolutely under the radar because the audience were way more interested in how I was able to open and switch between multiple AWS accounts in different tabs. I use another add-on that automatically creates new containers for AWS accounts launched from the SSO screen. And if I type 'gmail' in the browser, it lists my 3 accounts, and depending on which one I choose, it opens it in the correct container so I can have all three open simultaneously, without any messing around.
I tried using containers for a while, and found them to be severely lacking.
One example: You can't edit a container's site list, you can only add the currently loaded FQDN to it. So, you can't for example assign *.google.com to your Google container, you can only add each individual subdomain, and only after loading it.
Worse, if a host you want to add is part of a redirect chain, there seems to be no way to add it at all. For example, mail.google.com redirects you to accounts.google.com which quickly redirects you back to mail.google.com. There is no way to get accounts.google.com added to the list. As a result of this, the "Limit to designated sites only" feature is completely unusable. (And the only reason these problems exists is because Mozilla in its infinite wisdom has decided that an Add button and a text input in the sites list would be too much for us lowly users.)
Another common annoyance I had was the inability to clear cookies and site data for a given container only (or for the default container without affecting any named containers).
In the end I just bought more RAM and went back to using separate profiles.
Your assessment is similar to mine. Firefox appears to have done a lot of the under the hood work necessary to bring a cool feature like this to their product, but then completely stopped working on anything beyond a rudimentary UI.
> You can't edit a container's site list, you can only add the currently loaded FQDN to it. So, you can't for example assign *.google.com to your Google container, you can only add each individual subdomain, and only after loading it.
Yeah I've had the same experience. I tried to go all-in on automated containers. I curated long regex lists to make sure things grouped the way I wanted. Ultimately it just didn't really work. The major problems I hit were:
- Complex cloud services with many domains. Microsoft Office 365 uses such a bewildering collection of domains... I wound up just doing all MSFT stuff in edge. Google has similar issues.
- explicit rules are too brittle. I wish it could dynamically recommend a tab family to use based on content or similar.
- hard to manage. I wound up with dozens and dozens of temp container that buried my persistent, named containers. That made me rely more on the filtering rules, which required a lot of maintenance and tweaking.
I still find it amazing and love it. It does 90% of what I want from a silo'd experience. Sure it would be nice to have more but nothing else comes close unless you want to run multiple instances gobbling up even more ram than tabs and juggling those. I manage cookies with cookie autodelete which does much of what I want for cookie management.
Adding Containers to Chrome would be largely pointless - because Google anyway has access to everything. It's like adding a VPN to Android and then still using Map and everything while logged with your Google a/c. Chrome by design has no privacy.
I know many of us (if not all) are already aware of this (or something on this lines) but this is important to make this distinction when talking about Firefox and Chrome in one breath.
Comparing Chrome and Firefox when it comes to privacy is apples and oranges. I know you were not directly doing that but I still thought it is important to be noted.
...while I agree about Chrome and probably kinda understand if you expand that notion to whole chromium...
Containers aren't for protection against browser - they protect one digital identity from leaking into another. And to be able to log in into multiple accounts at the same time
Sidenote: I thought Brave was BS because I had the first impression it was purely funded by watching ads and earning crypto. You opt-in to this, it's not the default. They actually have an extensive list of modifications to disconnect the Chromium base from Google and provide better security. I would be using it if not for Containers in Firefox.
I realized I didn't want to manage profiles, I just wanted separate containers by default. So that's why I use Temporary Containers. I don't maintain a "work profile" or "shopping profile", etc. When I need cookies or other data shared between tabs I will Ctrl + click to open a link in a new tab, with the same existing container.
Now, to organize tabs I use Tab Stash. I put things like 200+ YouTube music tabs in 1 group, 1-off projects in another, k8s stuff in another, job/career postings I need to complete in another, etc. Things that are temporary are shown under the default group at the top. This also allows me to keep most of my tabs "frozen" and out of memory/inactive while still keeping 400+ tabs open.
(Tab Stash is vertical tabs. Sidebery was the fastest, but Tab Stash has the grouping and inactive tab stuff I need)
I love containers for development. I configure a socks proxy for each of my development environments and it lets me run multiple copies of my services all on the correct domain names.
Amen Sister. One container for browsing. One for my shopping gmail, ebay and Amazon. One for my fake Facebook acct. One for my work gmail, work chat and related.
> There's another called Proxy Containers so I can have separate tabs taking separate paths out.
I can use this literally yesterday for at least 3 separate issues I was facing.
> But I'm bound to Firefox regardless of the pros and cons because it's the only browser that can do this.
You and me both. I can live in a decent house with decent neighbors. Or I can live in pretty decent house with neighbors who borrow my stuff without asking, whiz on my fence and meet in secret to figure out how to exploit me.
I had a fairly long back and forth with a service I pay for while using one of the many Firefox container extensions. They want to track me and a new profile every access they did not like because they begun fingerprinting for “security”. White listing didn’t work and I ended up having to install chrome for them.
It worked very well for the “you have three articles remaining” to view for free. Now I’m back to scrolling to the bottom of an article to make sure it doesn’t disappear into same login wall and see if reader view bypasses it before I start reading.
I think that Firefox containers is a great feature, use them all the time, and have no desire for using separate profiles. That said:
- They aren't exactly an easy to discover feature. There is a mention of the feature in the settings, but making use of them requires the use of an addon.
- Other people do have use cases for separate profiles. Most people wouldn't even know they exist unless they have used Firefox for an incredibly long time, and they aren't exactly easy for the typical person to use.
I don't think you need a separate extension for proxy per container support. They support Mozilla's vpn thing by default but it cam be changed to any other proxy. Syntax is something like socks:host:port though I am mot sure about the GUI support to set it. I think I set it as part of Multi Account Containers.
By the way I've heard an extension author say that containers are not required with the new strict isolation features.
just a heads up on the privacy aspect: other than possible cross-site 0-days, tracking usually occurs with your browser fingerprint which by default doesnt change w/ Containers (its extremely hard to properly and accurately change it anyways, there are leaks even in the network layer) so it doesnt have too much of an effect except for unsophisticated ad networks/analytics
What are the added privacy benefits compared to Firwfox Total Cookie Protection, which is on by default? Ability to log in with different accounts in parallel is definitely very useful, but I'm looking for the privacy benefits compared to using Firefox without containers.
Firefox profiles are so underrated and (seemingly) underused. I create shortcuts for every profile, with the command to launch being `firefox --no-remote -P profilenamehere`. After that, I barely ever see the profile management dialogue, I just use each profile like it's a different browser.
It's convenient to isolate work and personal browsing, convenient to try out different extensions (eg. I have Treestyletabs in one and Sidebery in another, just to evaluate both and see for myself), and the memory usage of running two Firefox profiles is much less than if I ran Firefox and a Chromium browser instead.
I don't like profiles, because I find it hard, impossible maybe, to tell Discord to open the funny links my friends send me in the Personal profile, and Slack to open the work related links in the Professional profile.
I ended up having one profile configuration file and a keyboard shortcut that toggled between two different symbolic links, plus a Gnome extension to display the currently selected profile in the top bar, so I would use one profile during the work hours and another one during the evening, but it was slow, difficult to export to other computers and just messy altogether.
So now I'm using Firefox containers and I'm mostly happy with them. I wish the bookmarks bar would change depending on the currently selected tab however.
I use profiles not containers, and have links opening using the correct profile by wrapping stuff with the `BROWSER` environment variable. For example my Signal.desktop launcher contains this line
I've been making a "browser switcher" which you can set as the default browser and you can pick which browser to open links in (using a UI similar to the alt-tab UI). I currently have it working with Chrome profiles, but I suspect Firefox profiles wouldn't be too hard (so long as you can open a link in a specific profile from the command line).
The problems you're outlining are solved in chrome, and any chromium browser. I'm not saying switch. I'm saying that people have been complaining about these to Mozilla for over a decade and they won't fix it.
Most of the link based stuff is solved in other browsers by opening the link in the last active profile/window you had open. Pretty simple solution. That's all it takes, Firefox however will open links in whatever default profile you have set.. regardless of if it's open or active or not. It's a terrible behaviour. Just fixing that one thing would solve most of the big complaints people have with profiles.
I always get downvoted for saying this, but containers are not a good solution for profiles, not out of the box, and not for anyone who wants to separate work/personal.
The average user shouldn't have to install a bunch of plugins and then configure them to get the functionality that profiles gives.
I've been using Hammerspoon[0] to direct different links to different browsers. With a little work you can basically make links open in the right place every time, assuming that the applications are opening links in the system browser and not doing their own thing.
I use both Slack and Discord webapps in the according profile, why not use that? They already run in sandboxed browser instances (I guess), so there's even less overhead running them in your browser. (I did not do extensive testing, so I might be wrong here)
You should check out "Simple Tab Groups". You can bind tabs of a certain group to always open in a specific container. On top of it you get fantastic grouping, and hiding of tabs in groups, and other controls. In this way I have container groups segmented to their own views and have no issues controlling how existing logins work between different use cases. It's also easy to back up and share between machines.
I've written my own tiny Python script for this, that launches the right executable based on the URL. It works really well for my situation with two different Firefox profiles.
> So now I'm using Firefox containers and I'm mostly happy with them.
Seconded if for no other reason, I rarely restart my browser.
As an aside: Each night I copy my profiles over to a Firefox instance in a VM. I access it as a remote app so I can get to my containers/logins while I'm away.
I think it's OK to expect "normal people" to do that, but I've been trying to embrace my OS's feature sets (stuff like desktop shortcuts) to configure my computer how I want it to.
There can be some digging involved, but if you get things set up then you can have your cake and eat it too (most of the time at least)
Wait.. does this make the profile switching UX nearly identical to chrome? I abandoned a switch attempt because I found containers inadequate and profile switching too cumbersome.
That is not an extension maintained by Mozilla. Why do you think it’s needed for profiles? Profiles are built into Firefox and don’t need an extension to be used.
That's a useful tip. I need access to several Microsoft live/AD/teams accounts, and they just don't work well in the same browser session.
I've been using chrome profiles to separate these because the Firefox ones were a little clunky; for some reason it never occurred to me to create shortcuts per profile. Thanks!
> I have Treestyletabs in one and Sidebery in another, just to evaluate both and see for myself
You don't have to put them in separate browsers/profiles, you can just switch which one takes the sidebar, on the fly. I use both Grasshopper[1] and Tab Center Reborn or Sideberry and switch between on the fly them depending on what features I need at any specific moment.
Sadly, chrome does a much better job (for me) with chrome profiles and how well they are integrated. Extensions, shorcuts and everything. This is the ONLY thing that keeps me on chrome. Otherwise I would go FF. Safari added new profiles a few days ago. Will test it, and maybe switch to that
If only there would a user friendly/intuitive way to switch profiles like in every other chromium browser.
I tried using the about:profile and created multiple profiles with cli but it is not user friendly at all.
Meanwhile, I am a big fan of multi containers in firefox and wish it was in chrome or edge.
Firefox profiles are indeed great. Especially as they're so easy to backup and restore across machines, even different OS. Some simple fiddling with installs.ini and profiles.ini then run Firefox with -P as you say and you're good to go.
I've used this process for over a decade, probably more than 15 years now I think about it. Hard to remember! Sadly it doesn't work with Firefox on Ubuntu anymore due to that being a snap package. I'm sure there is a simple enough solution to get it working the same with the snap version but I instead prefer to remove the snap version of Firefox on Ubuntu and use the release directly from download.mozilla.org as I have the download, install and restore all automated for Windows, macOS and Linux so why make my life harder with snaps just for Ubuntu? :)
I just copy the profile directory. I managed to implant a profile from windows to manjaro, then Ubuntu. Though I don't remember what I had to deal with in canonical's case and their snaps, it could not have been that hard given that I did it.
Does cloning profiles (by copying an existing profile content to a new folder with a new name) work seamlessly? Or does every profile have some unique identifier that can cause problems if just copied over?
The reason I ask is because I have some basic setup config that I would rather not have to manually re-do for every profile.
In my experience, just copying an existing profile to a new folder doesn't work -- you're backing up your data, but you're not creating a new profile.
So what I typically do is first create a new profile via Firefox' UI, then I just copy the data of the profile I want to clone into the corresponding data folder of the profile I just created.
As long as a `-P profilenamehere` argument is specified, that dialog doesn't pop up (that's why I said "I barely ever see the profile management dialogue"). Just edit the default Firefox shortcut to have a `-P default` argument in its command section, and you can avoid the profile selection dialog.
Am a firefox user since 0.9. I see there's a lot of love for Firefox in the responsonses here.
However, the profile UI and general managment experience compared to Chrome/Edge is pure trash. No, container tabs is not a viable substitute (my work and my personal profiles don't even share bookmarks). Yes am aware of a third party addon that requires additional software to be installed - this just proves the point further.
So today I'm using Firefox only for personal and chrome (/edge) profiles for everything else. Only reason I am sticking with Firefox is because of the Android version. If I could get ublock origin working on edge/chrome on android I'd probably abandon Firefox.
Safari really nailed their profile implementation in that regard - separate bookmarks, history and session and that in addition to tab groups. I think Firefox is not far from this, only if they could refine the experience.
Disagree. They serve different purposes, and are both very useful. And it's not like the profiles system needs vast developer resources that containers "sucked up" or something, the problem with profiles is mainly a UX/design issue, and even more pertinently, a lack-of-attention issue.
What's so bad about typing in: about:profiles, into the address bar and selecting the profile you want to use? Or even creating a shortcut with the: -p, option to select one n starting Firefox.
Genuinely, what else are chrome/edge offering that is a deal breaker for you?
> Genuinely, what else are chrome/edge offering that is a deal breaker for you?
Unless you fiddle around with using different themes for each profile, or install kludgy extensions, there's nothing indicating which profile a window is currently using.
How does one launch a profile from the about:profiles page? ;)
It's a concept that is first class supported and easy to use in all othe browsers. There is just a ton of usability issues across the board, even with the third party addon.
From any browser window and any context, I can use CMD+Shift+M and either open a new window in a different profile, or switch to the first available window for that profile. The browser then clearly indicates which profile I am in and has some UI elements for it as well.
So it's just like any other core browser feature: having it being integrated into the experience directly, and being able to use it from anywhere, with a shortcut or clear UI element, is a much better experience than having to navigate to a settings page or use a bespoke application shortcut.
If having to open a bookmark always required opening a bookmark webpage, instead of the bookmark list or the url bar integrations, then that would be a much worse experience and certainly a reason to prefer one browser over another.
You know what most people do not even know this exists. Even if it exists why would they prefer this instead of just clicking user icon and switching their profile as in chrome or edge.
Most people like simple and boring UI which is straight forward.
Yeah, and also I’d like it to ask me what container to open for a website sometimes, out of remembered ones. E.g. I have a website I use in just two containers (out of 15), and I like it to ask each time I open a new instance, so I won’t have to choose out of all my instances, just those two.
I'm a heavy user of Firefox profiles, but I have two major feature requests:
- Allow better visual distinction of profiles, e.g. giving them different colors. When you have multiple browsers open on multiple profiles, it's easy to get confused.
- Create a better UX when accidentally launching a profile that's already running. Currrently what happens is that it waits for a timeout and then displays an error message. Instead, it should just give focus to the window already running.
I use https://color.firefox.com/ to differentiate. It's a solid theming system that they built a few years ago, promoted for about a week and then never mentioned again. Probably because they'd rather promote their braindead self-destructing themes (sorry, 'Colorways drops')
My solution to both of these has been to create separate .desktop entries for each profile and give each a theme and a custom icon. That way I can know from the window manager which profiles I have open and which one I'm looking at according to the theme. You can then launch a specific profile through the icon, with Super->"ffwork", or with the right-click->open new window if you have it open already.
The main problem is that I have completely forgotten how to do this multiple times across different machines and I never remember which combo of FF flags and .desktop values necessary to get instances identifying themselves to the dwm as a separate program. I think this is correct though https://askubuntu.com/questions/1209434/how-to-display-two-d...
>Allow better visual distinction of profiles, e.g. giving them different colors. When you have multiple browsers open on multiple profiles, it's easy to get confused.
This would be nice, but one thing you can do for now (though it takes some discipline to not screw up) is to use separate virtual desktops, and put the different profiles on different desktops.
> Allow better visual distinction of profiles, e.g. giving them different colors.
I use the profiles in Brave for that exact reason. The ability to have different colors on the icons in the taskbar and the browser chrome was the reason I gave Brave a go in the first place. Now it is a feature I cannot live without.
I have a number instances + one with Chrome/macOS for each client/entity and certain activities.
Each browser has a different set of extensions, and adblock rules (I can't go on hackernews, except with my social media browser). My main development browser has more dev extensions for example.
It also makes tab-management easier, as I can just close the "work browser". All of them have a separate instance, icon, and color. It helps me focus, as I don't accidentally see time-wasting websites, and if I'm not in my media browser, I'll get an error when trying to navigate to one of them out of habit.
It wasn't easy to get working perfectly, as I had to create multiple instances of Chrome, which also means signing the apps. All profiles and app-data are in a separate folder. Not doing it like this means you don't get to cmd-tab to the other browser.
I have the same approach and extend the habit to mobile.
I use regular Android Firefox with extensions like Ublock Origin for fun browsing, then have the beta Firefox with same extensions for always in private mode browsing and finally Chrome for all work stuff.
I tried using the profiles, but found them too exhausting to handle, especially with the way multiple windows of the same application are handled in MacOS.
Brave does profiles perfectly. And they have sync chains - so no online accounts needed. Unfortunately their mobile browser have only one profile which is annoying. It should not be hard to implement it.
" Within the browser, you can create browser profiles. As such, you can have different windows open with different profile, but all on the same instance of Brave. "
I don't use any accounts with my chrome browsers where I don't want to. Syncing of profile data should be possible using any synced file service.
Firefox profiles are great, not denying that. And disabling JS is very important, I've been using noscript for many, many years. Can't even remember when I started.
But having two profiles to switch between JS and non-JS seems like a massive hassle to me. I just hit shift+t in noscript and it temporarily removes restrictions on a tab.
Noscript mainly protects you from those unknown tabs being opened by malware, that you don't expect. But usually on a huge website like theregister or etsy you can disable that while you do your business.
One feature I'd love to see in noscript though is globally disabling noscript by domain. And that is mainly due to AWS using randomized cloudfront subdomains to include assets.
I don't want to whitelist *.cloudfront because anybody can use that to host malware.
I have uBlock origin installed already, but do they do what I want? Maybe you misunderstood me.
I want to go into the aws console and based on the primary domain (in the url bar) I want to allow all JS for that tab automatically, if that pre-condition is met.
Noscript right now can only whitelist specific domains. So if the primary domain is amazonaws.com and it includes assets from 123.cloudfront.com then there is no way to temporarily whitelist 123.cloudfront.com automatically when I enter amazonaws.com. It has to be done manually.
Fun fact: you can assign each separate Firefox instance a different X window class with the --class flag. Then your window manager may be configured to raise windows with that class to the top.
E.g. I have something like this in my StumpWM config:
Then all I need to do is type hyper-shift-f and the Javascript Firefox is either raised to the top or if there is none, one is run. Meanwhile, hyper-f raises my normal Firefox.
Highly recommended; I hope that I will be able to continue using it in the future. Does Wayland support window classes and the hyper key?
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There's another called Proxy Containers so I can have separate tabs taking separate paths out.
There are many benefits to Chrome and it's dev tools, and I respect the Firefox mission more for all the shit Mozilla has done. But I'm bound to Firefox regardless of the pros and cons because it's the only browser that can do this.
My presrntation was definitely undercut by the methods I use to browse the internet, and using an HDMI adapter direct to iPhone.
To them… it was like I fired up a custom rolled Linux distro from 20 years in the future and used minority report hand controls on it.
Really set some expectations for me on my next presentation.
One example: You can't edit a container's site list, you can only add the currently loaded FQDN to it. So, you can't for example assign *.google.com to your Google container, you can only add each individual subdomain, and only after loading it.
Worse, if a host you want to add is part of a redirect chain, there seems to be no way to add it at all. For example, mail.google.com redirects you to accounts.google.com which quickly redirects you back to mail.google.com. There is no way to get accounts.google.com added to the list. As a result of this, the "Limit to designated sites only" feature is completely unusable. (And the only reason these problems exists is because Mozilla in its infinite wisdom has decided that an Add button and a text input in the sites list would be too much for us lowly users.)
Another common annoyance I had was the inability to clear cookies and site data for a given container only (or for the default container without affecting any named containers).
In the end I just bought more RAM and went back to using separate profiles.
The Containerise addon lets you do both, thoug it hasn't been updated in a few years: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise/
- Complex cloud services with many domains. Microsoft Office 365 uses such a bewildering collection of domains... I wound up just doing all MSFT stuff in edge. Google has similar issues.
- explicit rules are too brittle. I wish it could dynamically recommend a tab family to use based on content or similar.
- hard to manage. I wound up with dozens and dozens of temp container that buried my persistent, named containers. That made me rely more on the filtering rules, which required a lot of maintenance and tweaking.
Adding Containers to Chrome would be largely pointless - because Google anyway has access to everything. It's like adding a VPN to Android and then still using Map and everything while logged with your Google a/c. Chrome by design has no privacy.
I know many of us (if not all) are already aware of this (or something on this lines) but this is important to make this distinction when talking about Firefox and Chrome in one breath.
Comparing Chrome and Firefox when it comes to privacy is apples and oranges. I know you were not directly doing that but I still thought it is important to be noted.
Containers aren't for protection against browser - they protect one digital identity from leaking into another. And to be able to log in into multiple accounts at the same time
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise/
https://github.com/kintesh/containerise
Are there any critical issues with this plugin?
Now, to organize tabs I use Tab Stash. I put things like 200+ YouTube music tabs in 1 group, 1-off projects in another, k8s stuff in another, job/career postings I need to complete in another, etc. Things that are temporary are shown under the default group at the top. This also allows me to keep most of my tabs "frozen" and out of memory/inactive while still keeping 400+ tabs open.
(Tab Stash is vertical tabs. Sidebery was the fastest, but Tab Stash has the grouping and inactive tab stuff I need)
Amen Sister. One container for browsing. One for my shopping gmail, ebay and Amazon. One for my fake Facebook acct. One for my work gmail, work chat and related.
> There's another called Proxy Containers so I can have separate tabs taking separate paths out.
I can use this literally yesterday for at least 3 separate issues I was facing.
You and me both. I can live in a decent house with decent neighbors. Or I can live in pretty decent house with neighbors who borrow my stuff without asking, whiz on my fence and meet in secret to figure out how to exploit me.
It worked very well for the “you have three articles remaining” to view for free. Now I’m back to scrolling to the bottom of an article to make sure it doesn’t disappear into same login wall and see if reader view bypasses it before I start reading.
- They aren't exactly an easy to discover feature. There is a mention of the feature in the settings, but making use of them requires the use of an addon.
- Other people do have use cases for separate profiles. Most people wouldn't even know they exist unless they have used Firefox for an incredibly long time, and they aren't exactly easy for the typical person to use.
By the way I've heard an extension author say that containers are not required with the new strict isolation features.
[0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212544#links
It's convenient to isolate work and personal browsing, convenient to try out different extensions (eg. I have Treestyletabs in one and Sidebery in another, just to evaluate both and see for myself), and the memory usage of running two Firefox profiles is much less than if I ran Firefox and a Chromium browser instead.
I ended up having one profile configuration file and a keyboard shortcut that toggled between two different symbolic links, plus a Gnome extension to display the currently selected profile in the top bar, so I would use one profile during the work hours and another one during the evening, but it was slow, difficult to export to other computers and just messy altogether.
So now I'm using Firefox containers and I'm mostly happy with them. I wish the bookmarks bar would change depending on the currently selected tab however.
Most of the link based stuff is solved in other browsers by opening the link in the last active profile/window you had open. Pretty simple solution. That's all it takes, Firefox however will open links in whatever default profile you have set.. regardless of if it's open or active or not. It's a terrible behaviour. Just fixing that one thing would solve most of the big complaints people have with profiles.
I always get downvoted for saying this, but containers are not a good solution for profiles, not out of the box, and not for anyone who wants to separate work/personal.
The average user shouldn't have to install a bunch of plugins and then configure them to get the functionality that profiles gives.
[0] https://www.hammerspoon.org/Spoons/URLDispatcher.html
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
I use Mac and ended up implementing something that I can tweak easily, not polished but works.
https://github.com/mechanicker/chromer
Maybe it works for others, too.
Link: https://github.com/fdw/brooser
Seconded if for no other reason, I rarely restart my browser.
As an aside: Each night I copy my profiles over to a Firefox instance in a VM. I access it as a remote app so I can get to my containers/logins while I'm away.
There can be some digging involved, but if you get things set up then you can have your cake and eat it too (most of the time at least)
Firefox really needs to integrate it!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
I've been using chrome profiles to separate these because the Firefox ones were a little clunky; for some reason it never occurred to me to create shortcuts per profile. Thanks!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
You don't have to put them in separate browsers/profiles, you can just switch which one takes the sidebar, on the fly. I use both Grasshopper[1] and Tab Center Reborn or Sideberry and switch between on the fly them depending on what features I need at any specific moment.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37306058
(Also, because TST is familiar to me from years of usage, I'd probably end up never switching to Sidebery.)
Meanwhile, I am a big fan of multi containers in firefox and wish it was in chrome or edge.
I've used this process for over a decade, probably more than 15 years now I think about it. Hard to remember! Sadly it doesn't work with Firefox on Ubuntu anymore due to that being a snap package. I'm sure there is a simple enough solution to get it working the same with the snap version but I instead prefer to remove the snap version of Firefox on Ubuntu and use the release directly from download.mozilla.org as I have the download, install and restore all automated for Windows, macOS and Linux so why make my life harder with snaps just for Ubuntu? :)
Deleted Comment
The reason I ask is because I have some basic setup config that I would rather not have to manually re-do for every profile.
So what I typically do is first create a new profile via Firefox' UI, then I just copy the data of the profile I want to clone into the corresponding data folder of the profile I just created.
However, the profile UI and general managment experience compared to Chrome/Edge is pure trash. No, container tabs is not a viable substitute (my work and my personal profiles don't even share bookmarks). Yes am aware of a third party addon that requires additional software to be installed - this just proves the point further.
This issue was reported 13 years ago! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=662025
So today I'm using Firefox only for personal and chrome (/edge) profiles for everything else. Only reason I am sticking with Firefox is because of the Android version. If I could get ublock origin working on edge/chrome on android I'd probably abandon Firefox.
Now I barely use profiles in Firefox while I have 5-6 profiles in Chrome for various things as it's much easier.
Genuinely, what else are chrome/edge offering that is a deal breaker for you?
Having a simple UI that you can just click and launch other profiles, really.
Unless you fiddle around with using different themes for each profile, or install kludgy extensions, there's nothing indicating which profile a window is currently using.
It's a concept that is first class supported and easy to use in all othe browsers. There is just a ton of usability issues across the board, even with the third party addon.
From any browser window and any context, I can use CMD+Shift+M and either open a new window in a different profile, or switch to the first available window for that profile. The browser then clearly indicates which profile I am in and has some UI elements for it as well.
So it's just like any other core browser feature: having it being integrated into the experience directly, and being able to use it from anywhere, with a shortcut or clear UI element, is a much better experience than having to navigate to a settings page or use a bespoke application shortcut.
If having to open a bookmark always required opening a bookmark webpage, instead of the bookmark list or the url bar integrations, then that would be a much worse experience and certainly a reason to prefer one browser over another.
Most people like simple and boring UI which is straight forward.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
In Chrome I use profiles and set up those extensions on my "shopping" profile only.
In Firefox I use containers, but can't isolate these extensions the same way
- Allow better visual distinction of profiles, e.g. giving them different colors. When you have multiple browsers open on multiple profiles, it's easy to get confused.
- Create a better UX when accidentally launching a profile that's already running. Currrently what happens is that it waits for a timeout and then displays an error message. Instead, it should just give focus to the window already running.
For that I simply use different themes and it works perfectly
The main problem is that I have completely forgotten how to do this multiple times across different machines and I never remember which combo of FF flags and .desktop values necessary to get instances identifying themselves to the dwm as a separate program. I think this is correct though https://askubuntu.com/questions/1209434/how-to-display-two-d...
This would be nice, but one thing you can do for now (though it takes some discipline to not screw up) is to use separate virtual desktops, and put the different profiles on different desktops.
I use the profiles in Brave for that exact reason. The ability to have different colors on the icons in the taskbar and the browser chrome was the reason I gave Brave a go in the first place. Now it is a feature I cannot live without.
Each browser has a different set of extensions, and adblock rules (I can't go on hackernews, except with my social media browser). My main development browser has more dev extensions for example.
It also makes tab-management easier, as I can just close the "work browser". All of them have a separate instance, icon, and color. It helps me focus, as I don't accidentally see time-wasting websites, and if I'm not in my media browser, I'll get an error when trying to navigate to one of them out of habit.
It wasn't easy to get working perfectly, as I had to create multiple instances of Chrome, which also means signing the apps. All profiles and app-data are in a separate folder. Not doing it like this means you don't get to cmd-tab to the other browser.
I tried using the profiles, but found them too exhausting to handle, especially with the way multiple windows of the same application are handled in MacOS.
https://community.brave.com/t/is-there-any-way-to-install-2-...
" Within the browser, you can create browser profiles. As such, you can have different windows open with different profile, but all on the same instance of Brave. "
I don't use any accounts with my chrome browsers where I don't want to. Syncing of profile data should be possible using any synced file service.
But having two profiles to switch between JS and non-JS seems like a massive hassle to me. I just hit shift+t in noscript and it temporarily removes restrictions on a tab.
Noscript mainly protects you from those unknown tabs being opened by malware, that you don't expect. But usually on a huge website like theregister or etsy you can disable that while you do your business.
One feature I'd love to see in noscript though is globally disabling noscript by domain. And that is mainly due to AWS using randomized cloudfront subdomains to include assets.
I don't want to whitelist *.cloudfront because anybody can use that to host malware.
I want to go into the aws console and based on the primary domain (in the url bar) I want to allow all JS for that tab automatically, if that pre-condition is met.
Noscript right now can only whitelist specific domains. So if the primary domain is amazonaws.com and it includes assets from 123.cloudfront.com then there is no way to temporarily whitelist 123.cloudfront.com automatically when I enter amazonaws.com. It has to be done manually.
E.g. I have something like this in my StumpWM config:
Then all I need to do is type hyper-shift-f and the Javascript Firefox is either raised to the top or if there is none, one is run. Meanwhile, hyper-f raises my normal Firefox.Highly recommended; I hope that I will be able to continue using it in the future. Does Wayland support window classes and the hyper key?