Disable Profile-Badge

[Schneeeule]

It would be great to have an option to turn off the badge that shows which profile is currently active.
With “badge,” I mean the small overlay icon that appears on the app icon in the taskbar!

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[KimB]

Hi, @Schneeeule and thanks for your idea! 

Could you please share a bit more about why you are asking for this? I'm asking because our user feedback so far indicates that the badging (overlay icon) is helpful because folks want to know what profiles are open/running. Perhaps you're running into an issue we don't know about yet!

[ernest314]

Personally, I have a main profile where I do most of my browsing, and a few additional profiles I occasionally use for security/privacy/isolation. While it's nice to know which profile I'm using for the additional ones, 95% of the time the clarification is irrelevant. At least in my mental model I think of myself as just using "Firefox", and having an additional badge obscuring the icon is a slight annoyance most of the time.

[myakura]

wholeheartedly agree. I've just realized that the icon on the top-right corner of my Firefox (138 beta) was a profile icon and I see it confusing and jarring. It just appeard from nowhere and looks like a notification badge.

[albertk]

I agree this option too since I also have a main profile which I use and I'd like to only have the overlay for the other profiles!

[Schneeeule]

@KimB I mean that when only one profile is open, I don't need to see which one I'm currently using.
And if there were an option to turn it off completely, users like me - who use different color themes for each profile - wouldn't be annoyed by the icon in the taskbar.

[ringonoki]

I have one profile. Therefore no badge is needed. I just want to be able to switch it off entirely.

I find the image very visually distracting, jarring, and cluttered. As well, it took an afternoon of googling to finally figure out even why the FF logo in my taskbar was suddenly obscured by a white star. Having the default profile badge/overlay icon thing be a white star identical to a bookmark star made even finding out what it was hard. If you google "remove white star from firefox" every hit assumes it's a question about bookmarks. I only  learned the term "overlay icon" from this page.

[ainawing]

I also don't use more than one profile. I don't want the 'profiles' menu, I don't want to know there are profiles. It's jarring for my use case. Please let me disable the settings and displays for this feature completely...

[Boooooo]

wtf! I have a shopping cart today in firefox icon!

[Thaldan]

That would be great that we can disable it, let it activated bu default for "normal user" but let the choice for the ones who wants that.

Take care 🙂

[verbedr]

Now you can use custom badges, so I made a transparent 1 px badge which makes it disappear.

[verbedr]

Now with the custom badges, I made myself a 1 px transparent badge.

[Pataeto]

Seconded. Personally, it just clutters up the taskbar icon for me. Also, I can already differentiate my profiles easily because I set different themes for them to where I can tell at a glance which profile is active, and I know many others also do the same.

I do also see the merit in its ability to distinguish between profiles for those who like to have the same theme across all their profiles though, hence my support towards adding a toggle to decide whether to display the badge or not. Also, more well-communicated customization in the hands of the user is always a good idea!

[Schneeeule]

@verbedr Thank you for this advice.

[Glaucon]

I just use one profile—and am the only person who uses my computer—so I don't need an additional avatar overlaid on the Firefox icon letting me know I'm using the only profile I have (I did experiment with additional profiles, but I found them frustrating and not particularly useful for me).

It's amazing how much it bothers me having that avatar there. I'm sure not everyone will feel the way I do, but it just looks like cheap clip art. It doesn't help that the default avatar was a shopping cart. Why would Firefox assume I'm using a browser to shop?

I do realize I can make a custom profile. But I don't want a personalized avatar on my app icons at all. I don't understand why I don't have the option to turn it off—there's no reason to force someone who uses just one profile to have an avatar. I like Firefox, but I hate how it looks on my tool bar so much I am genuinely thinking of switching to another browser.