Try out Firefox Profiles in Nightly

[KimB]

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 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!

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 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)

[Guiomm]

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.

[KimB]

@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!

[okay_okay]

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

[GoodEnoughENI]

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.

[KimB]

@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.

[KimB]

@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.

[jhops]

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.

[GoodEnoughENI]

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!"

[KimB]

@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.

[rabidrabid]

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.

[Synchro]

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

[wutongtaiwan]

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

[v127]

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.

[s_hentzschel]

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.

[Synchro]

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.

[rabidrabid]

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)

[Synchro]

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"

[suikaz]

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

[s_hentzschel]

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@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

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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.

[eluxzen]

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?

[jhops]

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.

[2mustange]

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.