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)

[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.

[jashu]

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)

[moritz]

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.

[hlein]

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.