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Firefox's profiles implementation sucks
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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I think this really comes to what exactly you want to separate. You say
"I often need to use two different profiles". Okay, why do you need to use separate profiles though? Maybe separate profiles are not a great solution in the first place for your purpose?Firefox profiles are amazing because you can be sure that no data is shared between the two profiles (unless you sync them of course) - for whatever reason one might want that. But if you just need some session separation then containers would be a much better fit.
Two users using the same computer at home, so we're not going to log-out/log-in every time one of us wants to watch a video on YouTube or to check their email, with Chrome we just click on our own Chrome shortcut or hover over our own shortcut to see our own windows that are already opened. Separate profiles is the exact solution to our situation.
There's no reason data separation can't work with what I'm talking about, it's just different shortcuts for the different profiles and the associated widows stacking under their respective shortcut, it is in fact much simpler than the current Firefox implementation with one shortcut and then you need to choose a profile or you need to go to about:profile to switch and all the instances are stacked under the same shortcut in the taskbar.
Fair. For something like that containers don't work, and indeed profiles are probably the way to go. I sure wouldn't mind if about:profiles had a button to create new icon for that specific profile which then would also be in its own taskbar group, but I doubt I would want it as default for new profiles.
At any rate, having multiple profiles per same install on same Windows user poses some issues. Like what profile are links in other applications supposed to open in?
I think the few times that happens it's the first profile that has priority, in our case it doesn't really matter as it's only game launchers under my name that do that anyway.
We also have other computers just for our own stuff, it's the one connected to the TV where it's an issue.
Okay, since it doesn't like it's your main computer or anything, you might be interested to try taskbar profile grouping. Go to about:config and while there create a new boolean pref named
taskbar.grouping.useprofileand set it totrue. Doing that the two profiles should have their own group in taskbar. It's a very crude feature though, since for example the right-click jump list items are not separate and you can't set different icons for them (unless you do that via Windows somehow), but it sort of works.