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.

[KimB]

@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.

[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.

[KimB]

@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.)

[rabidrabid]

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!

[Synchro]

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

[KimB]

@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 😀

[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

[KimB]

@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! 🙌

[maurizio_t]

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?

[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.

[KimB]

@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!

[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"

[s_hentzschel]

@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.

[KimB]

@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.

[KimB]

@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!

[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]

---

@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.

[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.

[eluxzen]

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

[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.

[hazing3991]

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.

[asimibrahim]

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@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)

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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?

[myspace]

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. 

[jorluiseptor]

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.

[Anonymous]

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

[yocosa]

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.