The only thing I miss is the ease which you can create and use different profiles in Chrome. Facilitates testing web apps. Firefox's support of multiple profiles is kludgy.
This is funny - because I actually resisted switching to Chrome initially because it didn’t support multiple profiles at all.
FWIW, I find Firefox’s support for multiple profiles fine - it just requires the -P argument, which you can wrap up in a shortcut or launcher script. (On Windows, add -no-remote to force a new instance to launch). -P takes an optional profile name, so you can add it to your scripts to auto-launch a Firefox with a particular profile preloaded.
Sure, it could use a proper UI, but if enough people clamour for it I’m sure that can get added. The fundamental support for multiple profiles is quite good.
No, this suggestion is wrong. I looked into using FF containers as a chrome profiles replacement and they’re not the same thing at all. I can dig up my notes if you like, I think they’re posted on HN in fact. FF has true profiles and those are what you’d use.
I agree with GP. Chrome profiles are what’s stopped me switching to FF.
It does depend on exactly why you want profiles -- for my use cases, Multi-Account Containers (and Temporary Containers) do a much better job of helping me achieve what I want to do than either browser's implementation of profiles.
I maintain that it is a widely-propagated misconception that Firefox containers can be used to replace Chrome profiles. Here are my notes from when I investigated:
I went deeply into trying to use containers as a profile replacement, replacing Chrome with the new Firefox beta for one month, and I can report that it is not the right direction to go in:
- New tabs do not inherit current container
- No way to make Ctrl-T do this by customization (I investigated extensions (can't remap Ctrl-T) and even system-wide Ctrl-T remapping with Karibiner; neither gives you what you want)
- History is shared across containers. So e.g. work URLs mixed up with personal. That's contra to one of the main purposes of Profiles.
- External applications do not open a tab in the current container. So e.g. clicking in a link in work slack will fail because it will not open in a tab which has work cookies / google account etc.
Evidently Containers are not designed as a Profile replacement. I'm not sure what they are for but I don't think it's a need that I have.
As I understand it using the long-standing Firefox profiles feature is the way to go, but personally I switched back to Chrome after a month of the new Firefox Beta because of the convenience of Chrome profiles. I should try Firefox profiles, but I exhausted my experimentation energy on Containers.
You're right about the limits of containers. When I'm browsing normally, the default is not to be logged into Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Things like my "Gmail this" bookmark fail because I set up Gmail in its own container.
However, I find it very useful to have specific containers for Facebook, banking, other social networks, most of my gmail accounts, etc. So I can be doing stuff for my son's soccer club's email without it affecting my own gmail.
I think of containers as a user tool. It seems like profiles are more of a developer tool.
> So I can be doing stuff for my son's soccer club's email without it affecting my own gmail.
In Chrome you could click on the profile icon in the top right and add a profile "Son's soccer club", and I believe that would also prevent it affecting your Gmail, etc.
> I think of containers as a user tool. It seems like profiles are more of a developer tool.
In Firefox, yes it seems like it. But not in Chrome. The point I'm trying to make (if by any chance there are Firefox people listening!) is that Firefox would benefit from making their hidden profile feature easily available to users, as Chrome does. But then they'd have the confusion of containers vs profiles, so it seems that they should just make containers behave like Chrome's profiles. But Firefox has Profiles! So why did they introduce Containers? IOW it honestly seems like they've made a mess there and the Firefox would be improved by fixing that mess.
I suppose a corollary of that is that Profiles are a poor substitute for Containers. And Containers largely match what I actually want to do, which is to have a shared history while being able to split out certain login (or cache) contexts, without needing a separate window.
