Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

[KimB]

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)

[KimB]

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)

[_wojtek]

Can I create an icon to open particular profile directly?

[wbob]

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!

[paulllll]

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

1. Manually enable browser.profiles.enabled in about:config.
2. Open about:newprofile in the current window. This changes the theme of the current profile (which is already unexpected).
3. I erroneously assumed a new profile had been created (especially since the theme changed) so I clicked Delete.
4. 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.

[jhirsch]

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

[paulllll]

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

[BeardyDude]

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.

[nthali]

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.

[jhirsch]

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.

[joatman]

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.

[maurizio_t]

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.

[Nancywharrell]

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!

[Apurv]

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

[algopenne]

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! 

[phonics8226]

Any updates on the additional icons?

[YamiYukiSenpai]

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?

[_wojtek]

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!

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

I tested custom profile

[Ni_Bab]

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! 

[Ni_Bab]

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. 

[ia]

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.

[YamiYuki]

Is there a way to open directly to the profile you want, without needing to go through the profile manager every time?

[ia]

Under the profiles you can choose from on startup (or go to Manage Profiles) there is a checkbox labeled "Choose a profile when Firefox opens." If you uncheck that it will not ask you every time.

[stopwatch6143]

This will be an amazing feature for Firefox, it's actually one I'm looking the most forward to. I hope it releases very soon for normal Firefox. Thanks

[ia]

You can enable it now in the main release version of Firefox by going to about:config, read and think twice about the warning, search for browser.profiles.enabled and set it to True. It was not without hiccups for me and these profiles are not the same as nor compatible with existing about:profiles profiles.

[mattjl]

This is great to see added.  Looking forward to testing.  Are there any plans to allow the multiple profiles to live in the same browser window, similar to Arc/Zen?  It is really nice for workflow to be able to switch between profiles without focusing on a separate application window and arranging it on your screen as desired.

edit: sorry - digging through the thread, I see this has been asked several times already.

[ia]

Yep, you can do that with a feature/extension called containers. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

[mattjl]

I have used that extension, and unfortunately I don't consider it to be a substitute for what I and others are asking for.  It is not a good experience in terms of having different workspaces (tab filters) per container and assigning tabs to a container

[susmithab]

Hi Everyone,
Thank you for your continued interest and for sharing feedback here. I’m excited to share that Profiles will soon be rolling out in the next few weeks to 100% of Firefox users! 🎉 
Make sure you’re updated to Firefox 144 so you can try it out. Please continue to share your feedback and suggestions once you’ve had a chance to try it.

Thank you,

Susmitha (on behalf of the Profiles team)
Product Manager