Back in Firefox 138, the new profile UI made it to the stable channel. If “Profiles” isn’t already showing near
the top of the main menu, interested users can go in through about:config and flip the
browser.profiles.enabled option to true.
I created a new Shopping profile to check it out. (Formerly, my shopping has happened in a mix of dedicated containers for commonly-shopped stores, and temporary containers for less-common stores, in my core profile. However, that profile frequently breaks checkout with its high level of privacy settings and extensions.)
First off, the good: this is far more convenient to access than about:profiles, and much prettier. What’s
more, it adds the profile badge to the Firefox icon in the Dock and Cmd+Tab list (macOS)! There’s no more
guessing about which identical Firefox corresponds to which profile.
Passkeys, since they are stored in the system’s keyring, are available across profiles. Signing in at the new profile didn’t require any password management. Finally, as a particularly geeky note, these are just like old Profiles, with independent extensions, themes, settings, bookmarks, and history. The meaning of the “profile” name hasn’t been changed by this.
That leaves the one thing that could be improved. This UI is completely separate from the traditional
about:profiles. Existing profiles do not import into the new UI. Profiles created under the new UI aren’t
visible at the old UI. If my existing profiles had seamlessly imported, that would have been amazing.
Incidentally, if anyone needs to know, the new profile UI is at the url about:profilemanager.
On the whole, the new system is a no-brainer. It’s love at first sight. I will probably retire Containers from my core profile, only retaining them in Shopping or AWS containers to keep sites/accounts separate within those domains. I do know that AWS has multi-session support now, but I’m used to the containers for that.
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