topic Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly in Discussions

Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 16:21:22 GMT

Hi, all y’all!

Important update: Profile management for Firefox desktop is rolling out to a Release test group in 138. This feature allows you to separate and easily switch between aspects of your online life to improve your efficiency, privacy, and focus. (For example, I’m a proudly disabled university student who works full time as a Firefox product manager and loves rowing and musical theater, so I set up 4 Firefox profiles: medical, school, work, and personal.)

While we’d love to make it available to everyone on Release right now, profile management is more complex than it probably appears: it’s built on core Firefox code, and it interacts with and affects several other features and essential systems. To ensure Firefox and the profile management feature remain stable and compatible, we need to continue our incremental rollout for now.

In the meantime, we’d love you to use profile management on Nightly and Beta, where it’s on by default for everyone. You’ll help us validate fixes, catch new bugs, and get early access to new features and enhancements. If you like what you’re seeing, it’s due in no small part to the feedback that early users have already provided.

The following video demonstrates how to create and use Profiles in Nightly:

A few other important things to know:

Profiles is in active development, and you’ll see improvements over the coming months as we iron out functional and visual bugs and polish this feature.
This SUMO article provides additional information.
This feature is separate from the about:profiles experience, and we currently have no plans to change how about:profiles works. You may continue to use about:profiles if that is better for your workflow.

Finally, a heartfelt THANK YOU for your feedback, ideas, and votes related to this feature so far. Your voice strongly influenced this early version and our backlog, along with extensive user research and interviews (including with members of the disability community). We know there is no “one perfect solution” and your ongoing contributions will help us ensure we’re building profiles to be useful and delightful for as many folks as possible.

We look forward to hearing from and collaborating with you,

Kim (on behalf of the Profiles Team)

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly 134

Guiomm — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 09:37:03 GMT

Hello!

Thanks for this awesome feature.
Is there a way to open firefox to a given profile from command like arguments ? Like how the old `-p profile_name` worked with old profiles ?

So far, my workflow has been to open firefox by forcing a new instance and have the new profile picker open on firefox open, but it has some caveats like not behaving properly if I select an already opened profile.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

okay_okay — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 14:56:21 GMT

Testing it out now. Looks great so far! More avatar options would be good.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

jhops — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 15:06:43 GMT

Looking forward to the new profiles options. One major question that wasn't addressed - will Firefox import all current profiles when this rolls out? If it only imports the default profile, it'd be nice to know so we can back things up.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

GoodEnoughENI — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 15:07:46 GMT

I have the need for about 50 profiles, for various developer accounts/environments, so being able to select my own avatar from an image stored on my computer will be essential.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

GoodEnoughENI — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 15:11:32 GMT

Kim and Team, one behalf of the Firefox community, and after waiting impatiently for this feature for roughly three(?) years.... thank you - thank you - thank you !!!

I'm waiting for the public release but what you are showcasing in Nightly is very promising and exciting.

I can't wait to once again be able to say, "Firefox is still the best!"

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

rabidrabid — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 15:44:06 GMT

Finally!! Kudos to the team for finally implementing this!

Quick question that isn't addressed in the video, will we be able to switch profiles quickly with a keyboard shortcut? Like CTRL +ALT + SHIFT + LeftKey or something that switches to the next profile on the list or something.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Synchro — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 10:06:26 GMT

Will it be possible to set a password for a profile?

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

wutongtaiwan — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 06:00:18 GMT

It is recommended to give each profile a button to add to the sidebar to allow switching in 1 sidebar, as well as to give a desktop icon to a different profile, and click the icon to launch the corresponding profile

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

v127 — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 03:06:55 GMT

Hello!

Personally I don't use profiles because I am a casual browser user, but this is so cool for people that needs or wants to keep separate work, social or any other topic.

Thank you so much for bringing new features to Firefox.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

s_hentzschel — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 18:52:58 GMT

Thanks for working on a better profile management! I have two questions:

1. Why it's not possible to use Sync with more than one of these new profiles? This is a very huge restriction that does not exist with the "classic" profiles.

2. In the support, it was asked how the new profiles relate to the previous profiles. The new profile menu does not list any old profiles; conversely, about:profiles does not show the new profiles. Are there really no plans to unifiy the experience? Otherwise it is very confusing. To be honest I don't know how to explain to the users in the support that there are profiles in Firefox, and there are… profiles - it's basically the same, it even has the same name, but there are differences. From an UX and support point of view, I would really like to see one consistent profile concept instead of two almost identical but still different concepts.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Synchro — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 06:14:47 GMT

I agree about Sync. I can understand that if new profiles are supposed to work like "One profile for one person" so that to make it possible to use one browser for the whole family, when its every member use their own profile. But if new profiles are supposed to separate my hobby, my work and my banking then it's strange to create different Mozilla accounts for Sync.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

suikaz — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 17:42:20 GMT

personally I feel like profiles are too strict isolation, ideally I'd like to create "layers" that can share some things with the main profile, more akin to containers because I'll mostly want the same extensions (and their configs!) and userchrome for all of them but have separate cookies and cache (containers handle this relatively well, but make it easier to open with CLI) and bookmarks for example (but still allowing me to easily "add bookmark to X layer", also making the "work layer" disable built in password manager and use external one

"profiles" are cutting too much, mostly meant for completely different users, and IMO that should be handled by the OS using systemwide user profiles

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

s_hentzschel — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 21:27:47 GMT

@suikaz wrote:
"profiles" are cutting too much, mostly meant for completely different users, and IMO that should be handled by the OS using systemwide user profiles

I disagree that profiles are "mostly meant for completely different users". This in one use case, but there are a lot of use cases for profiles. And even if so, it's not always necessary to create different profiles on OS level, if a separation of data in Firefox would be the only use case for that.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

rabidrabid — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 23:07:19 GMT

I think new profiles are meant for different persons, your use case could be workable with containers, which are already implemented (same person but different scenario)

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Synchro — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 16:20:33 GMT

Sounds reasonable but in this case it's confusing that KimB in first post says, "I’m a proudly disabled university student who works full time as a Firefox product manager and loves rowing and musical theater, so I set up 4 Firefox profiles: medical, school, work, and personal"

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly 134

KimB — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 16:40:20 GMT

@Guiomm, thanks for trying it out! There’s not currently a command-like way to open one of your new profiles, but I’m adding your suggestion to our (large and growing) feature backlog for further user research and consideration. We knew that some folks who are longtime users of the older about:profiles feature like and use the `-p profile_name` method, but we didn’t have any signals yet that it might be desirable for this new profile management feature, and we appreciate your taking the time to tell us.

I’m curious about this issue you’ve flagged: "...[I] open firefox by forcing a new instance and have the new profile picker open on firefox open, but it has some caveats like not behaving properly if I select an already opened profile."

Could you please share a bit more about what is “not behaving properly?” I’m asking in case you’ve found a bug (or bugs) we’ve not seen yet. Thank you!

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 18:19:09 GMT

@okay_okay, thanks for being an early adopter & tester! We know from user research that it’s really important to be able to easily differentiate between profiles – and some portion of our users will need a LOT of profiles. I’m delighted to share that providing more avatar options is at the top of our feature backlog.

Among other planned avatar improvements after we finish work on this MVP version, we’ll be adding more icons than the initial six (6). The book, briefcase, flower, heart, shopping cart, and star were a helpful “MVP starter pack” that prompted early testers to share their ideas for others – and we’re excited to show you the new additions soon after we finish work on the MVP!

That said, if you’ve got a wishlist for specific icons, please feel free to share it here. The more we know about what folks need and want, the more useful, accessible, and delightful this feature will be.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 18:30:22 GMT

@GoodEnoughENI -- I love delivering good news to our users! As part of our planned avatar improvements after we finish work on this MVP version, folks will be able to create avatars from the images of their choice.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

eluxzen — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 19:05:17 GMT

Thnx I'm going to test this feature. One question, how does it differ from the containers I'm using now to separate work, volunteer and private life browsing?

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

jhops — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 19:25:20 GMT

There are many reasons someone may want a full profile over a containerized experience. The easiest example I can think of is separating work and personal accounts with a hard separation. I work in an industry subject to FERPA laws. I don't want my work accounts in any way mingling with personal accounts (including one profile to manage both). Containers are not a suitable replacement for profiles in my case.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 19:57:32 GMT

@GoodEnoughENI – Wow! And we thought we were excited for this feature! 😊

Thank you so much for your kind words of encouragement, and please continue to tell us what you think – including ideas for improvements and what you find most useful.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

2mustange — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 17:01:59 GMT

Thanks @KimB,

I have been messing with it off and on since it was up in Nightly. I think the initial implementation is great. A few things I would like to see:
1. Ability to change the default profile, That way if you aren't loading the profile manager on load it goes to the one selected not the "original".

2. Custom Avatar Icons and profile background: Would be nice to set up my company icon and banner, while also making a profile dedicated to school.

3. Ability to Secure a profile behind a password or some authentication before it opens. My idea for this is if this browser is on a computer used by multiple people they can set a profile per user and lock it down. This would remove the need to setup multiple Windows accounts for my use case. And secures a dedicated work profile.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 21:56:56 GMT

@jhops -- Thanks for your encouragement and question! We are not planning to import any existing non-default profiles to the new profile management feature for the MVP rollout. There are a number of reasons for this decision, including making sure that we avoid confusing users who forgot they created profiles in the past, and supporting the privacy of folks who already use profiles for this reason. We will use separate profiles for different installs of Firefox (Nightly, Beta, Release), and each install will display separate lists of profiles in the new management feature.

However, we know that some folks do want the ability to migrate some or all of their existing profiles to the new feature, and this is on our backlog for further evaluation.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

hazing3991 — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:29:00 GMT

When opening a link from an external application, it is placed in the last created profile instead of the default profile. This seems to be a bug.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 19:18:33 GMT

@rabidrabid -- thanks for the love, and for your idea! We’ve been watching user feedback for additional profile switching methods in order to validate some of the options in our feature backlog, and you've just ensured that we need to consider this one 🤛

Related: If you aren’t aware yet of this long-standing and popular request for customizable hotkeys, you might want to upvote it/chime in. (My golly, do we have a LOT of keyboard shortcuts already, and adding new ones can be challenging sometimes.)

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

rabidrabid — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 19:27:43 GMT

That sounds great!! Thank you!

Regarding the customizable hotkeys feature request I didn't know about it! I went fast and upvoted it. Thanks for the time to answer and I hope to see these cool features go live soon!

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 22:28:04 GMT

@Synchro -- As of right now, we would probably build out setting/managing passwords as part of a larger feature in our backlog. For example, we know that some families share home computers, and there are a few different scenarios where passwords could add value. It could be helpful if the parent of a four-year-old was able to set a different password for their own profile vs. their child’s to prevent accidental mixing.

If you’re comfortable sharing some examples of how you’d use passwords, we’d love to hear about them! We don't assume we've captured every good idea yet 😀

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

eluxzen — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 11:06:55 GMT

Thnx for explaining, I might try the new feature when it arrives in the standard version of Firefox which runs on my work laptop.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 22:47:34 GMT

@wutongtaiwan – thank you! We think the way you describe profile switching from the sidebar could be very helpful for our users. We’ll include this in our feature backlog for consideration.

Would you please also create "sidebar profile switching" as a new idea in Connect so we can use it as one of our ways to gather feedback from folks? Many thanks! 🙌

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

s_hentzschel — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 22:55:48 GMT

@KimB- Do you know the answer to the sync question? It's really unexpected to me that I can't use sync for different profiles on the same machine, as it was always possible with the "old" profiles. I am sure that there are many users who do not want to synchronize between profiles. But not enabling this also takes away some use cases. For example, I might have different profiles for different configurations or different histories (like work and private), but want to have the passwords or bookmarks synchronized.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:19:54 GMT

@s_hentzschel -- Thanks for your follow-up question! You were at the top of my list to respond to today, but you beat me to it 😉

I’ll add a bit more clarity on the other questions and topics in this thread next week, but I wanted to respond to this specific post first because you’re understandably enthusiastic about something we heard in user testing: being able to use Sync with profiles is indeed useful for some folks in certain scenarios, and therefore it’s in our feature backlog.

The main reason we didn’t include it in this MVP version is because we learned early on that the designs and code to use Sync with the new profile management feature will be very complex. Besides the work we need to do on the profiles team, we’ll be partnering with several other Firefox teams -- and they’ll need to design and build code for their areas, too. We’ll reassess the feature backlog priorities and team schedules after the MVP work is complete.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

asimibrahim — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 05:17:49 GMT

@KimB wrote:
Hi, all y’all!
Profile management for Firefox desktop is now on by default in the current version of Nightly. This feature allows you to separate and easily switch between aspects of your online life to improve your efficiency, privacy, and focus. (For example, I’m a proudly disabled university student who works full time as a Firefox product manager and loves rowing and musical theater, so I set up 4 Firefox profiles: medical, school, work, and personal.)
The following video demonstrates how to create and use Profiles in Nightly:
A few other important things to know:
Profiles is in active development, and you’ll see improvements over the coming months as we iron out functional and visual bugs and polish this feature.
This article provides additional information.
This feature is separate from the about:profiles experience, and we currently have no plans to change how about:profiles works. You may continue to use about:profiles if that is better for your workflow.
Finally, a heartfelt THANK YOU for your feedback, ideas, and votes related to this feature so far. Your voice strongly influenced this early version and our backlog, along with extensive user research and interviews (including with members of the disability community). We know there is no “one perfect solution” and your ongoing contributions will help us ensure we’re building profiles to be useful and delightful for as many folks as possible.
We look forward to hearing from and collaborating with you,
Kim (on behalf of the Profiles Team)

This looks like a really useful feature for managing different aspects of online life! Excited to see how it improves over time. Will Profiles eventually sync across devices, or will they remain device-specific?

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 16:42:30 GMT

@s_hentzschel -- Hello again! I think I answered your first question about Sync here, but please let me know if you need more info.

To answer your second question about whether we might combine about:profiles with the new profile management feature, we are likely to keep both methods because this meets a wider range of our users’ needs.

We know, for example, that about:profiles is a trusted method for our own developers and QA team to create and manage dozens of profiles for testing. We assume that other users are doing the same, based on public comments in Bugzilla and other forums. We don’t know yet if folks want and need dozens of profiles in the new profile management experience.

We’ve speculated that some users with a smaller number of existing profiles may want to move/copy/ recreate some (all?) of them to the new feature. There are a few different items on the backlog related to this concept, and we’ll consider them after we finish the MVP version. Please do share your ideas and needs with us here!

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 16:58:56 GMT

@v127 -- Thank you for your support! As you suggest, we do our best to make Firefox as useful, accessible, and delightful for as many folks as possible. That means we aim to give people options for how they want and need to browse, rather than forcing everyone to do it the same way.

However, we do hope you’ll give profiles a try at some point. We’ve got a lot of great ideas on our backlog for this feature, and we’d love your feedback!

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

myspace — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 02:20:34 GMT

Thanks! It's a big improvement. One thing that would be nice for parents is a kids profile with parental controls kind of like netflix and youtube.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

maurizio_t — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 10:39:33 GMT

Hi! On Windows, unlike what is seen in the video which is on MacOS, it groups all Firefox instances in the taskbar/dock, preventing you from being able to change profiles easily as seen in the video.
Can it be fixed?

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

jorluiseptor — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 17:18:31 GMT

I'm excited to see this as I was trying to move away from Chrome and not having a good Profiles feature like in Chrome was keeping me from moving.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 14:36:38 GMT

hi !
Would love to be able to switch between profiles more seemlessly by swiping left/right on the sidebar or top bar like we do on Arc Browser to switch between workspaces. This would avoid to have multiple instances of Firefox in my dock.

The idea of workspaces could also be interesting, letting the user having multiple environment (tabs & bookmarks) for 1 profile

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

yocosa — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 16:47:15 GMT

I'm happy to see this, profiles are essential for me and the way they were handled before was just too cumbersome. I like that when I have multiple profiles open, there's a separate instance for each of them resulting in a separate icon in the macOS dock. It would be useful if the associated profile somehow persists after quitting. That way you can have multiple Firefox icons in the dock for different profiles.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

jashu — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 07:45:48 GMT

anyway to disable this feature? i personally don't need it and for me it is very buggy (eg: i created a new profile but am unable to delete it since about:deleteprofile is always a blank page)

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

maurizio_t — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 09:23:03 GMT

Hi @KimB is the correct way to report what is a bug (in my opinion) on Nighty to write here? Or would it be better to write on BugZilla? I am not clear since Nightly is a development channel.
Thanks in advance.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

moritz — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 02:52:02 GMT

Hi!

I've donwnloaded nightly to use it. I had hoped that with that, Firefox would become a viable alternative to Chromium for me. Unfortunately, the lack of multiple profiles sync is disappointing. Having a seperate work and free-time profile (that are hard separated) seems not like a nieche usecase to me.

Overall, the design is fine, albeit a bit confusing. There's certain interactions that make very little sense. For example, to switch profile, I have to first click on the name of my own profile. So, to switch to "Home", I have to click on the "user" icon, then on my "Work" profile, and only then do I see my "Home" profile. This is one more click than Chrome, and also a super unintuitive reaction.

The HTML to that is the "New Profile" card is a bit sad. The validation overlaps with the "theme" text, https://i.imgur.com/rVwFAdE.png, the visual hierachy is a bit "eh" at best. In general, the design seems a bit inconsistent.

We have three sections, three things I need to fill int:

Profile name
Theme
Avatar

Only two of them are bold. I guess you could argue that one is a label, and the other two are headings, but ... eh. It seems a bit weird.

In addition, the "Done editing" text is the only thing that's right alinged. I get that it's a form, but it seems weird.

Also, it's the only element not in the "theme" colors, would be a great opportunity to switch that as well.

Lastly, the wording here seems overly technical and verbose. But if you want to only make one change, specifically, "Done editing" is not a great call to action. "Get started", "Save profile", "Create profile", "Let's go", "Create" or anything like that would be better.

I personally would opt for "get started ->", but I don't know the rules that Mozilla has for the "personality" of firefox dialog boxes.

It's also sad that there's no pictures I can use, instead a set of 6 predefined icons.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

hlein — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 07:52:43 GMT

I am trying to use profiles to group different websites depending on their useg (e.g. general, development-programming, newspapers, ...). Up to now, I have found some inconveniences:
- new windows are always opened in the last used profile, which might not be "the right one" when I create a new window from the icon in the windows taskbar
- If several profiles are open at the same time, it is not possible to install updates (help - about - update). It says, that the update is done by another instance. If sometimes the update is done in the "original" profile, opened tabs in other profiles or creating new tbs in theremay have problems.
- If Windows is restarted when several profiles are open, only the contents of one profile are restarted automatically. The others must be started manually.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

hlein — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:14:13 GMT

Hi,

when you "open" a profile, all windows in that profiles are opened (which is very much ok).

To "close" a profile, you must close all its windows one by one. Is there a possibility to close the whole profile (and its opened windows) in one shot ?

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

maurizio_t — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 16:12:24 GMT

Today I tried on Linux (Ubuntu) and it works like on Windows, that is, in the dock it aggregates the various open profiles.
It seems that only on MacOS it works as shown in the video.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

seanogrady — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:02:43 GMT

Could we get a shortcut like Chrome has to open the switcher. My flow currently:

Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + M
Return

Can quickly switch to my work/personal profile

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

myspace — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 22:43:36 GMT

also shared in the tab groups thread that it would be beneficial to send a tab group to another profile

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

DarkestVoid — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 23:14:52 GMT

After trying Profiles I had some feedback. First, I'm happy that Profiles are finally coming to Firefox.

However, there are things that could be improved. I think it should be easier to switch between profiles, a and i think profiles should be displayed directly when clicking the profile button. Would be better if they listed one on top of the other. With the current one highlighted. With the current approach, you have to make 2-3 clicks to open another profile.

original profile (Default) - which is signed in. Have to click original profile just to switch? could be streamlined imo. This is what opens when you click original profile which could all be moved to the main profile button drop down.

Both the + New profile button and Manage profile button could also be on the original profile button. Click it and there you would have any profiles listed, an > button next to it for editing or more granular options, and the options to add new profile & manage profiles. I think it'll appear more seamless.

Chrome has them colored differently which helps visually tell them apart too.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Radi0silence — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 15:13:31 GMT

Dear Mozilla Team, I really appreciate all that you are doing!
Someone mentioned different desktop icons, I would love that very much as that's what I had in Chrome for my personal/work profiles. It made it easy to just click on one of those icons to open whichever profile I need.

When I create a second profile in Firefox Nightly, there's no way to create a desktop icon for it.

I tried to go into the Firefox profile manager in Windows 11 by pressing Windows+r > firefox.exe -p

From there, I created a Work profile and created a shortcut on my desktop manually, editing the Properties Target setting to: "C:\Program Files\Firefox Nightly\firefox.exe" -P "Work", and creating another profile/shortcut and changing the Target setting to "C:\Program Files\Firefox Nightly\firefox.exe" -P "Personal".

This seemed to work, however, my Work profile wouldn't sync if I open it from that desktop shortcut, and it would have an error in the profile icon saying Account Disconnected. If I go to the profile settings to connect to that account again, it pops up another error saying Account already in use. Screenshots attached. If I click on "Switch to Work", it fails with a message saying "Login attempt cancelled".

It seems the only way to get it to work correctly is by deleting that profile from the Nightly profile manager by going to Win+r and removing the Work profile. And from then on, opening the work profile only from the sidebar in Nightly. This isn't ideal because I use the Windows desktops feature, so one desktop will have all my work stuff and another will have my personal, so I have to switch to my personal one to open a work window.

Also, the image in the icon on the taskbar doesn't show correctly, it's a black circle instead of the icon I selected in the "Edit your profile" page.

And one last thing, why can't I include more than one screenshot in this comment?? I took screenshots of everything but apparently I can only include one.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

fancy — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 16:08:23 GMT

Wonderful job and i love it! Is there any way to create shotcut for each profiles? That means i dont need to choose profile on launch page every time ,I could open broswer with specific profile directly

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Erebus — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 18:28:16 GMT

I hope you will also add command line options for setting the AUMID and the icon of a profile.

The way Chromium has the --class command line option for this purpose.

This way we can open every Chromium profile from a shortcut in the desktop and it to have a different AUMID from the main executable.

This is necessary in Windows. Without setting the AUMID, everything is grouped together with the main executable in Windows 11 taskbar.

Currently to achieve that I using javascript and autoconfig in order to add these command line options.

This is the code I am using in order to call WinTaskbar.setGroupIdForWindow.

https://pastebin.com/raw/RXZfG5eh

We need a similar command line option like the --class command line option Chromium has in order to open profile shortcuts from desktop.

This way the profile shortcut will have its own AUMID and it won't be combined with the main executable in Windows 11 taskbar.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KellyClowers — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 18:42:11 GMT

Will we still be able use the classic functional profile picker? The new one reeks of modern web design and smartphone "apps" 🤢

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

OzDrDj — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 03:37:16 GMT

Loving Firefox Nightly and the Multiple accounts and really looking forward to the Adjustable Avatars. Would be good if you can Resize them also so We can fit more on one page.
One question though, where are the profiles stored? I tried copying from the Firefox Directory in Appdata Roaming but it did not work. Really want to synchronise all my profiles across mutliple systems.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

bric3 — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 14:07:06 GMT

About the profile in 138b4

* The avatar options are kind of limited, only the some symbols, not symbol coloring, no custom SVG. And even I would like no symbols for my "default" profile.

* On macOs if all window for a profile are closed, another Firefox app instance still hangs around and it's hard to close it, i.e. it says Close window and quit Firefox, but it is confusing if another profile is opened: which one if two profiles will be closed, both.

* Why a profile has to be a different browser ? I.e. and to be asked if it is the default ?

* Is there more system based theme with a tint (that adapts light / dark) ?

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly 134

bric3 — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 14:09:01 GMT

I second that choice of being able to open via command line. I'm using Finicky to open in specific browser and that would be nice to be able to support that in the future.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

kxra — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 10:37:54 GMT

Thanks for this answer, but I'm curious what are the limitations of profiles created with the new profile manager (aside from aforementioned Sync support, which appears to only be temporary). Does anything actually prevent creating "dozens of profiles" in the new profile manager, and either way, if we prefer the new experience, are there instructions to be able to migrate an existing classic `about:profiles` user into the new profiles experience (for example copying the profile directory on the system into a different directory)?

P.S. anyone looking for the `about:config` flag to test this out, it appears to be `browser.profiles.enabled`

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

SuperMatt — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 08:00:41 GMT

I would love to have the ability to choose in which profile certain links open. For instance, I could add *.mycorpdomain.com to always open in my work profile, and youtube.com to always open in my personal profile.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Irvin — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 02:29:54 GMT

hi, I already have many profiles with the old profile manager for a long time; it would be good if we could show those profiles in the new UI, which can motivate current users to engage with the new feature.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Invertex — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 21:40:35 GMT

Another use example for me is if I'm having friends over, I'd like to let them just use my PC account that has all my fun apps and games and stuff instead of having some completely separate OS account for when people are over. For work files, that's secured by Bitlocker drives. But for browser profiles there's no way to secure ones I don't want them accidentally (or intentionally as a joke haha) clicking into.

It also doesn't hurt to have a profile that is used for sensitive information/accounts also have that added layer of security to it in the case an attacker was able to pull files from a person's system. It's not an unlikely scenario for some malware to be run that uploads files from their system, but gets removed before its had a chance to encounter you typing that specific profile's passwords (if it's keylogging at all).

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Invertex — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 21:45:31 GMT

Why would this be a bug? This is very logical and ideal behavior... It's not opened "in the last created profile". It's opened in the last window you have focused.

But your comment is a couple months old, so maybe it was doing what you said back then, if so, that's fixed...

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Invertex — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 21:51:17 GMT

You don't delete the profile from there. Click the profile Icon at the top right of Firefox, click and account and click Manage Profiles, and then there is a Trash icon on each profile to delete them.

You can disable the feature by setting browser.profiles.enabled to false

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Invertex — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 19:04:59 GMT

Great to see this feature implemented! It's been a major pain point for switching from Chromium.

Alongside the suggested password protection, there is a feature from Chrome that I'd love to see implemented, which is to have a right-click on link context option for "Open As..." and then it expands to a list of your profiles. Allowing you to quickly open a link from one profile into another that you feel is a more appropriate profile for it. I use it pretty frequently.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Jon — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 15:51:13 GMT

Milestone unlocked 🎉

Check out the latest Release Notes for Firefox 138:

The new profile management feature is being rolled out to users—see @KimB's latest update in the original post for more details.

Your feedback and votes have played a big role in helping the team reach this milestone...so keep it coming! And stay tuned for more updates 🙌

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

bwat47 — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 22:21:22 GMT

Personally I disagree, I've always disliked the "open in most recent" profile behavior, because it's unpredictable. You don't know which profile will open when you click a link.

I know some people like it though. It would be best if it was like edge, where you have the option for chrome's behavior (open in most recent profile) OR the option to set a default profile for external links, plus the option to set specific domains to automatically open in certain profiles.

Example use case: Personal and work profiles.

On work PC, I want links to default to opening in work profile. because when I click external links on my work PC, 99% of the time they are from work emails, and I always want them to open in work profile.

On my personal PC, I want external links to default to opening in my personal profile. Except specific work domains which automatically open in my work profile.

Very logical IMO.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

bwat47 — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 22:24:32 GMT

Please add the ability to have the taskbar icons ungrouped! (e.g. if you have multiple profiles open at once, they are completely separate taskbar icons). Also, you should be able to easily create desktop/taskbar shortcuts for each individual profile from within firefox.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Erebus — Thu, 01 May 2025 13:16:54 GMT

They will have to add for that what chromium has, a command line option for setting the AUMID for it, Chromium has the --class command line option for that.

Chromium also uses this command line option for creating profile shortcuts in the desktop and each one not be grouped together in windows taskbar with the main executable.

They still haven't add it and it is easy to add it because Firefox already supports setting a different AUMID, it is used for private windows.

They need to add a command line for calling WinTaskbar.setGroupIdForWindow.

Unfortunately they still haven't and it is needed in Windows since Windows 10.

Let's hope they listen, profiles grouped all together in the taskbar is just a bad experience.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

palexdev — Fri, 02 May 2025 09:17:28 GMT

I was very excited for this new feature...until I was not anymore

On my gf laptop, I created my personal profile by using a shortcut and setting the destination to:

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P MyProfile

I can't import it in the new manager, even if I create a new profile and copy all the files over it does not work. Sorry guys but this is just dumb. I agree on not importing all the profiles by default, but at the same time it is a trivial task to just implement an import button on the manager window. Not only it's trivial, to be fair if this was one of my softwares I'd give this for granted in the design.

So, I'm still going to use the shortcut until the team hopefully implements this. Firefox 139? Firefox 198?

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Invertex — Fri, 02 May 2025 19:45:37 GMT

You do know what profile it will open in through, because you know it will always be the last window you interacted with. Setting different profile windows to different colors makes this a very efficient workflow instead of links always opening only in one profile always. If I want a link I'm about to click in another app to open in a specific profile, I click on that profile's window first and now all links will open in that one.

If you're on your work PC, you're interacting with your work profile, and thus links open in that window. You can quickly dictate what profile a link opens in by simply clicking on a different window to change your current context.

Very logical IMO.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

OnurOmer — Sun, 04 May 2025 12:59:24 GMT

Thanks for bringing this feature to Firefox. I should be able to run multiple profiles side by side, now when I run one profile, everytime when I want to open a new instance, instead of asking me which profile should this new instance be using, it automatically runs the new instance with the currently open profile, untill all open profiles are closed.

Sadly, it was till one of the builds available. I should be asked to select a profile whenever I run a new instance of firefox.

Here is the link to screen recording: https://imgur.com/a/yaTgnTA

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

vyrgozunqk — Sun, 04 May 2025 23:14:51 GMT

I somehow agree for the sync also.
I'd give example how I use profiles on Vivaldi:

I have entirely separate user account on my Mac for Work. On it, of course I have my browser with my work profile set and etc.
However, from time to time, during work hours I need to do some personal stuff, e.g. schedule flight, find hotels or other stuff. This is the moment I need the stuff from my personal profile and syncing with my phone.
In vivaldi, I simply select my personal profile, which is logged in with my personal vivaldi sync account, once I choose it, it opens again new window, but there I have my tabs, synced tabs, notes, bookmarks and etc., all being synced and shown.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

_wojtek — Mon, 05 May 2025 16:50:39 GMT

Can I create an icon to open particular profile directly?

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly 134

dotproto — Mon, 05 May 2025 22:40:33 GMT

Hey @KimB! This is an important feature for add-on developers. Mozilla's web-ext CLI tool launches Firefox using CLI commands. More specifically, `web-ext` depends on `node-fx-runner`, which constructs the desired command to launch Firefox.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly 134

Erebus — Tue, 06 May 2025 09:46:13 GMT

Please add command line options to create and use profiles (with the new profiles or the old profiles).

This way we will also be able to have profile shortcuts in our desktop etc.

What we need is a command line option to set the AUMID, so it won't be grouped with the main executable in windows taskbar. A similar command line option chromium has, the --class option.

Also a command line option to set the icon too would be nice.

A picker should not be need for creating a new profile from command line.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

wbob — Wed, 07 May 2025 00:41:22 GMT

it's great Mozilla taps into bringing profiles to more users. As others, I'm integrating profiles into a desktop environment (GNOME/Linux) thanks to the -P cli arg.

My usage with a subset of profiles borders on single-application use, so there is overlap of profiles with PWA/SPA, something to consider.

To untap the full potential Firefox platform teams each have to check how to do 1-click profiles in each operating system, I guess - hard work, good luck!

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

bwat47 — Tue, 13 May 2025 15:35:26 GMT

I do already have different colors/themes for each profile. The problem is that I don't always remember the last window that I interacted with, and I find having to click the window first before opening an external link to be annoying.

If it was a preference (between the current behavior of using last focused profile OR setting a default profile) that would work for everyone.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

paulllll — Wed, 28 May 2025 19:09:59 GMT

Apologies if this should be reported elsewhere, but there's currently a footgun with profiles:

Manually enable browser.profiles.enabled in about:config.
Open about:newprofile in the current window. This changes the theme of the current profile (which is already unexpected).
I erroneously assumed a new profile had been created (especially since the theme changed) so I clicked Delete.
Without prompting, my current profile is deleted, losing about a year of accumulated history, extensions, and browser preferences.

I was able to restore from a backup (Firefox Sync also works, but doesn't restore e.g. open tabs). However, I was under the impression that deletion would come with a warning prompt. Also, I don't think about:newprofile should affect the current profile.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

jhirsch — Wed, 28 May 2025 22:24:04 GMT

Hey @paulllll - Sorry you ran into this bug! Thanks for letting us know. Reporting problems here is fine 🙂

The about:newprofile page is only intended to be shown as the first page in a newly-created profile, and its delete button doesn't ask for confirmation in the spirit of letting users explore creating a profile, then backing out, with a minimum of friction. One of the internal nightly users ran into this same bug and filed a bug asking to confirm the delete (bug 1943863), but we closed it in favor of simplifying the intended use case.

In your case and the earlier case, though, one of the key problems seems to have been that about:newprofile is both visible in about:about and autocompletes in the urlbar. I think it's reasonable to remove it from both spots, and filed bug 1969136 to capture that. Hopefully that change will reduce the number of explorers who unintentionally clobber their data.

Just for reference, once you've preffed the multiple profiles feature on, there are "Profiles" menuitems added to the app menu (aka the hamburger menu) as well as the OS menu (mac) or top-of-window menus (linux, windows), and these are the expected entry point into the feature. You can learn more on SUMO: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

paulllll — Wed, 28 May 2025 23:49:00 GMT

Thanks for the detailed explanation @jhirsch! The current reasoning makes sense, especially since I ventured outside the beaten path (by manually opening about:newprofile).

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

BeardyDude — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 13:06:25 GMT

Great that this is being looked at - better multiprofile management was one of the main things keeping me in Chrome as opposed to FF - but it still needs work!

1 - It's 3 clicks to change profiles - why hide all profiles behind a menu, show a quick list of 2-3 at least! It's currently no faster than a toolbar shortcut to "about:profiles" and clicking "launch in new window" - 2 clicks, my previous method, albeit a little neater!

2 - It still doesn't let you create per-profile desktop shortcuts from the profile manager, which you can then pin simply to the windows taskbar and dress up with different icons - something a lot of people seem to want, me included!

At least it seems now to handle 3rd party app links better - they now seem to open in the most recently active profile, rather than always the default - and it also seems to separate into taskbar groups properly now as well.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

nthali — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 13:05:16 GMT

working on moving away from google. i see three separate builds - "beta", "developer edition" and "nightly". is the profiles feature only on beta and nightly, or is it available on developer edition as well?

also i just tried the beta version - Firefox 140.0b6.dmg on my mac, and didn't see the profiles option.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

joatman — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 14:40:25 GMT

I couldn't find where to suggest improvements. it's not necessarily a bug, but at least on my mac, each profile shows up as a separate icon in my dock unlike chrome/edge where there's only one browser icon in the dock.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

jhirsch — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 17:55:04 GMT

The multiple profiles feature is available everywhere, but it is turned off for most of the release population (and some of the beta population). If you typically used the release version of google chrome, as opposed to chrome beta or chrome canary, I'd probably suggest sticking with the release version of firefox, too, as it's a similarly stabilized build. So, once you download and install firefox, you can enable the feature manually by going to about:config, searching for "browser.profiles.enabled", then double-clicking the result to flip its value to true.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

maurizio_t — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 09:19:28 GMT

Dude, almost all suggestion here from Linux / Windows users is for have the same division that you have in MacOS 🤣

I'm kidding, seems nice to have an option for this.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

ernstke — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 12:34:40 GMT

Thanks for this answer, Kim. It partly addresses the big question I had when this rolled out on Nightly: why? Not so much why the new UI, I get that; it gives Firefox the appearance of being on par with other browsers, even though it was actually way ahead of the game here.

Firefox has had a relative straightforward storage mechanism, and a functional-if-spartan user interface for managing profiles for just about forever: path/to/firefox -P. Those profile folders can be easily located from the "Help" menu, can be backed up, copied to a different computer, or inspected at the filesystem level to troubleshoot problems, or dig into your own data, like bookmarks and history.

If you're planning to keep the "old" profiles around anyway for the long-time users who already knew about it, (apart from that new, more discoverable UI) what was the reason for not just building atop of the existing profile mechanism? Surely some of this confusion about the two different, mutually-incompatible types could be avoided that way.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Nancywharrell — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 08:55:04 GMT

Just gave the new profiles a try in Nightly and honestly, it’s really useful. I’ve been needing a way to separate work and personal browsing, and this makes it super easy. Everything feels smooth so far, nice job, Firefox team!

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 15:52:25 GMT

Hi @hlein -- a quick note to let you know that I've added this idea to our feature backlog (before I hand over this project to a different product lead on June 30). Thank you for suggesting it!

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 15:52:58 GMT

Hi @yocosa -- a quick note to let you know that I've added this idea to our feature backlog (before I hand over this project to a different product lead on June 30). Thank you for suggesting it!

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 15:56:58 GMT

Hi @seanogrady -- you may be interested in upvoting this related idea for customizable hotkeys, if you haven't already 😉 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/customizable-hotkeys/idi-p/4979

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

KimB — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 18:15:24 GMT

Hi @Radi0silence -- a quick note to let you know that I've added this idea to our feature backlog (before I hand over this project to a different product lead on June 30). Thank you for suggesting it!

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Apurv — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 07:26:39 GMT

i am a long time user, and i like the new updates overall, keep doing the great work.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

algopenne — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 06:18:55 GMT

On Windows, all profiles are grouped under the same icon on the taskbar. Very difficult to open the one you want, would be great if they could be separated!

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

phonics8226 — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 01:24:55 GMT

Any updates on the additional icons?

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

YamiYukiSenpai — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 13:57:39 GMT

Is there currently a way to "repair" a profile that I forcefully migrated from the old profile setup to the new one?

It currently doesn't open the profile manager from there
about:profilemanager is showing as blank there

Also, how do we delete inaccessible profiles?

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

_wojtek — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 23:26:35 GMT

With this new profile funcionality, will I be able to finally create dedicated icons ("apps") that I will be able to add to macOS dock?

Right now I can use ScriptsEditor/Automator to create ".app" that has profile specified with `-P` argument but this launches yet another firefox instance that has the default app icon instead of the custom one.

It would be brilliant to be able to have profiles differentiate like that!

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Agentvirtuel — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 07:22:26 GMT

Hello

I tested custom profile

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Ni_Bab — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 20:18:14 GMT

I've started to experiment with profiles and have a few points of early feedback. For context, I am using an intel Mac. Functionally I create a specific profile for each desktop window/workspace I utilize. Each workspace has a different purpose, e.g. - social media workspace, work workspace etc.). I generally won't be switching between profiles in a single desktop workspace; perhaps this makes me an odd use case...

I have noticed that when I click a link in a different application (like a desktop email application) it will open the link in whichever firefox window was last used - even if that Firefox window was open on a different workspace. Ideally, links clicked in a non-browser application would always open in the same workspace browser window.
There has been some confusion while trying to check for Firefox software updates. I keep seeing "Firefox is being updated in another instance." Ideally, there would be a way to click over to salient instance so you can complete the update process.
While I like that I can see a different Firefox icon with its appropriate symbol in my dock - if I try to have a specific Firefox profile's icon to be "Assign[ed] to this desktop" it will pull all the other profile windows from different desktops to the current desktop.

Beyond those issues I have been pleased with the experience using profiles so far!

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

ia — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 15:24:50 GMT

The "Profiles" menu option that comes after enabling the new profiles mode seems unnecessary and redundant. It takes up a lot of space on MacBooks with a notch display. There is already a profiles icon in the toolbar that gives the same options and that is sufficient. Even that could be called redundant as the same options are available in the hamburger menu on the far right.

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

ia — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 15:26:20 GMT

see the last FAQ at the bottom of this article for how they differ https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management

Re: Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

Ni_Bab — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 16:47:01 GMT

Reply to reiterate the software update workflow could use some tweaking. Right now, I have to quite (MacOS) all windows/workspaces and profiles of firefox that aren't in the "Home" or "Original" firefox profile and workspace. I then have to update the original profile, then use the Home/Original profile to spool up an instance of the other profiles and manually move them back to their designated workspace/windows.

Ideally, updating one profile would kickstart the update process for the other profiles in their own dedicated windows/workspaces.