Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse
28 comments
·October 29, 2025bluebarbet
ghostly_s
Tried containers when it was released but found it very inconvenient to manage. If I understand this solution doesn't even let you have two profiles open at once? That's even less useful imho.
edit: I use Simple Tab Groups which is far more featureful - "Send tab to [group/container/etc]" for example is table stakes.
bluebarbet
Of course you can have them open at once, that's what useful. I have four! And I can open subsequent windows in the right profile, no problem. But it required non-trivial scripting.
null
conaclos
Have you tried `firefox --no-remote --profile <path>`?
In my case, I am able to launch several Firefox instances with distinct profiles.
o11c
Note that `--no-remote` breaks starting new browser windows from outside, which users normally want.
I'm starting to think that setting the `HOME` environment variable is the only way to really make things isolated - this still won't handle `~insertusernamehere` but basically everything else respects it.
bluebarbet
Yes, I tried that and everything else. Either it refuses to launch with `--new-instance` or (from memory, in the case of your command) subsequent `--new-tab`s may open in the wrong profile. Presumably due to the order in which the original instances were created. The point is that the system turns on these UIDs, which are not paths or even hashes of paths.
throwaway150
Does this read like AI slop to anyone else?
That whole "Profiles don't/aren't just $THIS; they're also $THAT" construction is classic LLM output. Then you've got the weird confusing inconsistencies like calling profiles a new feature when they aren't and there's also the rule of 3 ("avatars, colours, naming", "set boundaries, protect your information and make the internet a little calmer"). It all feels machine-written. Even the comparison of tidying your tabs to setting boundaries seems meaningless. It's just the sort of empty parallels AI loves to make.
It's a short article but I really had to power through it because with every sentence I kept thinking, this is not written by a human. If it is AI-generated slop, that'd explain why some parts of it doesn't make any sense.
jmakov
The most useful feature with the worst UX. You have to type about:profiles and then create a new profile. But imagin you now want to move old profiles to a new computer and FF happens to run in a Flatpack. Yeah, much fun
agumonkey
there's an old '-P' flag that shows a small ui
throwaway106382
I'm happy this is getting a new UI. Always been a pain to use compared to Chrome profiles.
Profiles WITH container tabs is pretty killer, dont' think Chrome has anything like this.
sorcercode
for the most part I've been using Firefox containers and loving that life of getting the same benefits without having to create separate profiles.
but it's nice to see this finally get into Firefox because there are still a lot of folks who also want to maintain things like browser bookmarks, passwords etc in a separate profile. that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers (which IMHO is slightly better than having to manage multiple profiles)
happymellon
> that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers
But thats a massive difference.
I have work profiles and a personal profile. I have password manager profiles for clients (clients will provide their own PM logins to segregate their access) which are different between them, and having separate profiles is huge.
Containers are great, especially for crappy websites that use your sessions for tracking which page you are on, but they are no where near powerful enough.
sorcercode
that's fair (and glad profiles have finally arrived in FF for that reason); personally, i don't use password managers linked to any specific browser but i can understand your use case.
sudobash1
> that's the only conceivable useful difference over Containers
Actually, I have wanted better profile support for a while to segregate addons. There are plenty of addons that I want to use occasionally that require full data access. I generally do trust them, but even so, I keep these in a separate profile just in case. That is something that can't be done with containers.
attendant3446
Profiles were in Firefox for a long time now. It looks like they finally have made a proper UI for it.
skeledrew
Nice. I've been using Tab Groups Manager, and then Simple Tab Groups for years, but have also at times wished for more control and better separation while preserving ease of use (I really don't want to deal with providing CLI args). Hopefully this bridges the gap well.
mrb
What an extremely confusing blog post! I don't understand why it seemingly presents profiles as a new feature? Firefox has had profiles for years. What the heck is new?
I had to click the other link https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management to understand that this is all about simple UI improvements to make it easier to work with existing profiles.
The blog post is more than confusing, it is misleading. HN should link to the support page instead of the blog post.
skeledrew
For some reason neither my Dark Mode add-on nor the built in reader mode (which also makes pages dark as I prefer) work on that page. Very annoying; will skip reading that to preserve my eyes.
hobofan
100% agree. It feels like Firefox has had an identical announcement of this as a new feature every second major release for the last ~2 years.
They are seriously dropping the ball here in terms of communication and it just makes Firefox seem stale.
Lammy
> Firefox has had profiles for years. What the heck is new?
Even further back — Netscape had profiles! https://web.archive.org/web/20000816175642/http://help.netsc...
bashtoni
It looks like AI slop to me. "Profiles in Firefox aren’t just a way to clean up your tabs. They’re a way to set boundaries, protect your information and make the internet a little calmer." - classic meaningless comparison.
iamcalledrob
Glad to see improvements here -- switching between profiles has always been a weak spot for Firefox!
uniqueuid
Profiles have always been great, but it's kind of unfortunate that this feature seems to be locked behind a sign-in (the link in the article describes the UI as being in the profile menu).
I mean, I've been using about:profiles for ages, but it would definitely be nice to have a bit more polish (e.g. every now and again I forget that a newly created profile is automatically promoted to default)
[edit] well seems I have to eat my words - there's a switch in about:config named "browser.profiles.enabled" that toggles a profiles menu item with some UI that apparently has existed for years. Nice!
crtasm
Nice to know about that. Odd that it doesn't list any of my existing profiles though
uniqueuid
You're right, it seems both the UI and the old about:profiles page do use the same underlying implementation, but the UI does not pick up any profiles added through the about: page. If you create a new profile from the UI, that will show up in about (after a restart).
x0x0
I enabled this last night and it deleted my existing profile, fwiw.
Both bookmarks that I'd just created and, just to clarify I'm not losing my mind, the full profile because I had to reinstall ublock origin.
glub103011
[dead]
Profiles are great. I've used them for years. Much better than containers, which separate your data sort-of-but-not-quite. A profile folder has everything. You can copy it, back it up, plug it into a completely new Firefox installation later.
That portability is a killer feature, but scriptability needs to be improved. The manual says you can do:
>`firefox --profile <path> Start with profile at <path>`
But that will not work as expected if you have more than one profile (which is the whole point). At present the only workable solution is to fiddle with a GUI thru `about:profiles` (or `firefox --ProfileManager`) in order to create the profiles and give them all-important UIDs. And then do:
>`firefox -P <UID>`
It may seem small, but I've found that this is a serious roadblock. I wish it could be fixed so as to make profiles entirely scriptable.