> It would have been better if Mozilla had added a better interface to profiles.

Profiles in Chrome and their ease of use (Cmd+Shift+M to open a new window in a different profile) is the primary reason I still use Chrome over Firefox. I have a Personal, a Work, and a Development profile. The development profile is where I install dev extensions like React Devtools, Redux Devtools, etc. because they require full access to all sites in order to function. I don’t do regular web browsing with devtools installed. These tools seem trustworthy, but why risk giving them access to everything I do on the web?

I’ve tried Firefox Containers and can’t find the same power and ease of use Chrome Profiles have.

I see your point now, I was preferring containers because I have this scenario where I want the data separation it provides without the need of reinstalling add-ons, especially on a temporal container/profile. The shared window can be nice on some particular moments where I don't need to have a lot of pages opened and are continuously changing from tab to tab.

Thinking over about you said, now I think I like things from the two worlds, maybe better interface to containers or even better UI for profiles, with options to overcome the containers (maybe should be better for the average user instead of having both).

For the time being, I prefer to have both options (don't have it now) but I think both can be improved.

Upside of Chrome profiles: Use a bright red theme for prod sysadmin profile, and blue for work. So you never type « p... » on your work profile by mistake... Don’t laugh, usage is widespread.

I do exactly this too: I have 3 distinctly different themes for the three profiles I use. A split second glance at the color of the tab bar informs me which profile I'm working with.

That might work well with you but Chrome is not free software nor open source.

One might argue that chromium is, but in my opinion using chromium only enforces google chrome

Free and open source is tangential to my point? I was commenting on the functionality of Chrome Profiles vs. Firefox Profiles + Containers.

Why are Containers awful? Its great i use it all the time for this purpose.

I'm not znpy so I don't know why they don't like containers.

But I prefer profiles myself, as I have different extensions in different profiles and I get the two completely separate instances of Firefox, while containers are just separate tabs instead.

I don't think containers are awful though, they are just less useful for my use case than profiles.

I sometimes have issues with the profiles too though. If I have both profiles running concurrently and I click a link from a different application, I get an error that "Firefox is already running" and it freezes up the window with my primary profile.

Do you ever experience that?

Strange, haven't had that issue myself, running firefox-75.0-1 on Arch Linux. You probably should report that to Mozilla, if you can.

Thanks for this. I've been naively using containers. Yes, a UI for profiles would be awesome- we've been wanting that for a long time.

You can either start firefox with `-P` to the profile chooser when starting firefox, or navigate to `about:profiles` to show the UI for managing them.

Would allow greater discovery if this `about:profiles` page was exposed somewhere in preferences, but at least there is something I guess.

I just almost always start firefox with a mouse click- even on fluxbox :/

$ cd ~/.local/share/applications

$ cp /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop .

$ vim firefox.desktop

Add -P onto the end of the 'Exec' line. Now your click button for firefox will open the profile manager.

awesome!

If you dig around, there is probably a value in `about:config` that lets you tell firefox to always show the profile selector first. Otherwise, add `-P` to the argument fields in your desktop shortcut.

thanks! I didn't know about `about:profiles` !

> Firefox Containers are awful.

Any details, how do they leak?

> Only firefox profiles can give you true separation

I don't think they would help a lot against fingerprinting. (I have no idea how commonly used fingerprinting is at the moment.)

> Any details, how do they leak?

Extensions, mostly. You have to be real careful which extensions you install because extensions run at the window level (mostly) rather than the container level and see across/through containers.

Also things like auto-fill (including password suggestions); if you like that being very specific to context, then you'd want different profiles rather than containers.

I've found I've been using a mixture of profiles and containers, myself, to balance ease of access (containers are fast to launch and can auto-launch per specific sites) versus better extension control and auto-fill/etc separation.

(ETA: As for finger-printing, both containers and profiles are equal on the most common finger-printing: cookies and localStorage. Neither protects you well from IP Address tracking, which is a growing concern, but not the approach of at least the big players like Google or Facebook, yet.)

> Firefox Containers are awful

Do you have any sources or reasons for this condemnation?