I already use profiles in Firefox but this looks a much better interface for managing them.
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
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I think containers (that Firefox already has) are a much better way to handle this. Profiles, art least the way they are implemented on chrome, feels like a massive downgrade.
You can use containers all you want, just don't create another profile and you're golden.
This is what I do now, just trying to figure out why ff keeps spending time on profiles. Do they have any advantages over containers?
I thought it had had that for twenty years?
Yeah I don't know why profiles itself are being mentioned as a new thing. What's new is the more convenient interface for them
you don't like about:profiles?
Show of Hands:
Who's heard of "about:profiles"?
🦗🦗🦗
I use them all the time, they're great. I learned about it from another random Lemmy comment
Been using it for years.
Been using multi account containers [1] for a couple weeks, complete with per-tab-SSL vpns.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/
I want to use it but I keep forgetting it exists. Something like this should just be accessible via button in the UI so no-one misses it
I don't find it or using the profile manager as convenient as what Chrome has
I think they are just making a ui to manage it natively.
firefox -p was also an UI. Not as fancy as this one.
Also about:profiles if it’s already running
I tried it during covid when wfh started. I found it really annoying to switch between personal and work profiles. I prefer the chrome way of asking which profile each time I click the icon or having two separate icons.
Just add -P to Firefox launch flags once and then selected "prompt me everytime". This also has been true for rlike 20 years.
it's slightly different; before to have two profiles open at the same time you had to add no-remote and it was still quirky; now its much more streamlines and background links outside of firefox will open in whichever profile has focus.
Or just -P "profilename" to launch that profile directly from a shortcut.
You can have as many running simultaneously as you'd want.
about:profiles always worked for me. And the profile manager. I don't need a 3rd ui for switching profiles.
The new one is a much better experience. It works like profiles in chrome now. The old one is still there for you to use if you prefer.
Uhm ... is this perhaps for the android browser then?
The desktop browser has had this for a long long time, though in recent builds a bit hidden. I still use various profiles, very handy.
No, this is to make the desktop browser profiles work more like Chrome.
Vivaldi has it for years
I wish there was a feature like this on YouTube. I'd love a profile for watching educational videos, a profile for feeding me cool videos when I'm high, and a profile for when my kids want to watch stuff. I'm tired of vibing and listening to music videos only to get hit with a language learning podcast or Disney songs.
It's insane that they have an incognito mode that still serves up ads even though I have premium.
Youtube > Profile picture > Settings > Add or manage your channel(s) > create a channel
You basically get a new "profile" with your own subs, history, profile picture, and comments and premium/channel subscriptions apply to all of them
You can create different accounts under different email addresses.
Once you're logged in, you can switch between accounts from the dropdown menu.
I've done this in the past to separate French YouTube recs from English ones.
I did this as well but the other accounts get ads because the premium only applies to my first account. Terrible user experience and Google go hand in hand
In my anecdotal experience on my tv, the algorithm bleeds through accounts as well. Like a video that is more related to the content on one account is recommended on the other.
They do have categories and I've tried to put different channels in different categories, but the thing is just so hard to use I gave up.
It's quite surprising how bad Google can be at UX.
It really is wild how a company can be so massive yet unable to do basic UI. I got a notification that someone replied to a YouTube comment I made so I clicked the notification and it opened up YouTube's landing page. I tried to find notifications and couldn't so instead I tried to find a page that has my comment history.
I had to look it up and apparently you can't even find it on YouTube, you have to go to a separate website, my activity.google.com.
Yay, a 25 year old feature with a new UI design.
I'm using FF as my daily driver, but I feel my hatred for Mozilla soon reaches the level of my hatred for Google.
I do wonder (just in my head, there's no hint to that in the public) if all that money Google pays to Mozilla somewhere has a no-competition clause which says FF must stay more shitty than Chrome.
I'm not consciously of one Innovation out of Mozilla that made FF a better browser, and a lot of interesting stuff has been canceled.
It's still an OK browser, but it is like it was 15 years ago. While I watch colleagues using chrome reskins which have great tab management (amazing when you use Jira). Only now that we have LLMs people turn browsers into agents - why the fuck is there no cross - request scripting (go to google, search for this, click on 2nd result...). Yeah we have developer tools like puppeteer for that, but having - say python or js to do so would make people use it more frequently.
Browser history. Ah damn, a day ago I saw a page that explained how to do xx with yy while considering zz. How great some decent browse history would be. (And yes, FF, keep it all, but only when I'm at http://weirdkinkyporn.com/, please just store it for a few hours). A single keyword for history search IS NOT ENOUGH. I need to isolate things by adding a number of things, because if I knew the word I'm searching for, I'd just google it anyways.
Yeah, so much more things you could do (and the above ideas are just half - baked thoughts).
But Mozilla needa tha sweeet CEO payments. There's no money for experimental stuff.
About a month ago, I ranted about that with a few friends, afterwards I rage-contributed to the Servo project.
I just wish Google would cut off that Mozilla money, I really believe that would improve competition.
That no-compete agreement is a product of my imagination, but things really feel like that.
Fuck Mozilla.
Finally! That was my biggest gripe when I switched from chrome but I ended up just getting rid of all my profiles, time to set up my old workflows again
Right yes, for when buying a ring for my wife.
Yes they've had that for ages it's called incognito mode or whatever the equivalent name for it is on Firefox. But it definitely has that mode already.