In my opinion, profiles are useful for separating "who I am." Whether that's my personal life and my professional life, or if it's me or my spouse using the same computer.

Containers are useful for separating "who I am to my providers." As far as Facebook is concerned, I am a Facebook user, but I don't use Amazon or Google. But Amazon thinks I'm an Amazon user that doesn't use Facebook or Google. You can accomplish this with profiles, but in Chrome (last I checked) that meant multiple windows, rather than just sites being displayed in tabs that indicate the container in use. So for that purpose, I believe containers are more useful.

(I also think Firefox should step up their profile game, because when my spouse and I alternate using a computer we share, it's inconvenient for me to close all her Firefox windows so I can open my profile!)

You can definitely have two profiles open simultaneously - on MacOS, this is achieved with “open -n Firefox.app --args -P [profile name]”; on Windows, “firefox -no-remote -P [profile name]”. Admittedly, that should _really_ be exposed in the UI somehow, but at least it means you can wrap up the command in a handy desktop shortcut (e.g. one that says “my Firefox” and one that says “her Firefox”).

> Admittedly, that should _really_ be exposed in the UI somehow

Go to about:profiles, click the "Launch profile in new browser" button under the profile you want.

Yes, it's not obvious, and the UI has a lot to be desired if you want to explain the feature to some non-techie, but you no longer need to close the other Firefox instances in order to launch a different profile. I think this was added a couple releases ago.

Thank you. I didn't know FF had profiles to begin with.

Be aware that running multiple profiles at once can cause issues with updates. One instance can end up updating, which means that the other instance can no longer create new processes, because it is still on the old version, and it gets updated in place.

OK - I hadn't come across that. I actually have the shortcut on my desktop that prompts you to pick a profile if you don't have any windows open already. I'll have to see if I can tweak the shortcuts to open each one! Thanks!!

Yust a heads up: you can open different profiles simultaneously using the about:profiles page, see my other reply.

Containers helps keep things sandboxed and lets you use the same window with different tabs representing different sessions.

So in your case you could have say a "work" container and a "home" container. Each of these could persist logins for all of the services you are using without having to switch between users and have different windows open you just have the 2 tabs.

What I think people find more useful is the ability to make a container for say "facebook". Anytime you open facebook it puts it in a new tab with a sandboxed browser session. It's similar to having a separate profile but it's just for facebook use and you don't have to think about it so much. If you click a link to facebook it opens it in your new container already logged in meanwhile facebook does not see you as authed in any of your other tabs.

Firefox developers even make a specific Facebook Container add on that I recommend and use.

Instead of you needing to know all the tricks and tweaks needed to make it work well, they're in the box.

I don't even know it's there until it does something unexpected but necessary. For example the Facebook Container has no idea I pay YouTube not to show adverts. So inside Facebook any inlined YouTube video has adverts. If I follow a link to YouTube, I appear outside the Container and have no adverts but don't get followed by Facebook (they'd need YouTube to co-operate)

But this co-mingles bookmarks and add-ons. For work/personal separation profiles are definitely better

You log in with one account in one container and with the other account in another, and can mix them in the same browser session?

Yes. As pointed out in another thread, containers share history. But they don't share cookies or session status so you can have multiple gmail sessions going.

Having a container is nice compared to opening a private window because you don't have to do 2FA every time.

LOL, I'll sometimes just use different channel versions of browsers for different accounts when I have to access them regularly. The worst imho is when you have a google personal account and a google business (apps) account for work.

It's definitely something I'd like to see worked out better as a power user feature.