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)

[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. 

[myspace]

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

[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.

[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.

[hlein]

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 ?

[seanogrady]

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

[DarkestVoid]

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.

[Radi0silence]

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.

[fancy]

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

[Erebus]

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.

[KellyClowers]

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

[OzDrDj]

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.

[bric3]

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) ?