TIL Firefox has first class profiles... finally!

i just found out that firefox finally made profiles easy to use - a first class feature like chrome.

I found out from this techlore video https://youtu.be/dwFSytu_JUw

and even better then chrome, in macos dock bar, each active profile has its own icon

Chrome has had profiles for a long long time, easy to segment accounts/jobs for better isolation (extensions, etc).

Firefox has always had profiles hidden, they were just a super pain in the butt to the point where it wasn't really usable.

Better isolation is great!

artwork 8 points 3 months ago

Just to clarify, what do you mean by "hidden"? It’s been having the options -P, -ProfileManager , -profile for decades now.

If you cannot disable extensions, you must create a new profile before upgrading to Firefox 0.8.
Source [2013-12-06]

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The following examples show the use of the -ProfileManager command, which will open the profile manager prior to starting Firefox...
Bypass profile manager and launch application with the profile named profile_name. Useful for dealing with multiple profiles.
firefox -P "Joel User" Source

And same for Thunderbird <3

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jet 8 points 3 months ago

Just to clarify, what do you mean by “hidden”? It’s been having the options -P, -ProfileManager , -profile for decades now.

Yeah, that is a pain in the butt - you wouldn't use that in a normal workflow. Plus you couldn't tell which window was in which profile! you needed a extension to give the windows labels, but they still got mixed in the taskmanager/dock etc.. it wasn't really usable in normal multiprofile concurrent workflows. As proof, your example firefox profile manager is empty!

As a motivational example right now I have 25 profiles, for 25 services I use, and i swap between them all the time.

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artwork 5 points 3 months ago

Thank you for the response! Am sorry, but proof for what?
The profile selector is empty because I used a temporary Kubuntu environment at https://distrosea.com/ for the screenshot, since I am currently on-the-go.

Holy smokes! 25 profiles! That's a profile for almost all possible 25 identities for the whole month of a spy job!

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jet 2 points 3 months ago

Am sorry, but proof for what?

that firefox profiles are not first class like they are in chrome, but that is moot now, they are just as easy to use now.

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