Most people don't use chrome profiles either, this is definitely a power user functionnality.

I'm not entirely certain this is true. Maybe at one point it was, but nowadays since signing into any Google site signs you into Chrome, a lot of folks have their work and personal email addresses as profiles in Chrome.

Also from what I've noted is that when you sign into a secondary account on the main profile's account, Chrome is prompting you if you don't want it to create a new profile for you.

Then again, they have the problem that they think that it's appropriate to open the last used profile if you start Chrome again, which can lock out inexperienced users out of the other profile since they don't know how to get that one started.

For me the normal solution of creating separate profiles in Firefox is to use Firefox Portable and have each profile live in their own directory / installation.

> For me the normal solution of creating separate profiles in Firefox is to use Firefox Portable and have each profile live in their own directory / installation.

That seems a bit overkill to me. Creating profiles can be done at about:profiles and starting a profile with a shortcut to firefox --profile $PROFILENAME. Not sure how that could be simpler

>Not sure how that could be simpler

I'm not a fan of Chrome, by any means, but you can't be serious here. A Chrome-style built in profile switcher is how it could be simpler.

Most people just don't troll on hn all day and don't do personnal stuff on their work computer. We are a different kind. I know a lot of people who are afraid of possibly be fired for logging on their webmail with their work computer.

Additionnaly virtually everybody owns a smartphone which is used for the personnal stuff.

I wish you were right, but that's simply not the case.

These are still power-users. There are millions of power users out there, obviously, but relatively speaking they are a niche.

So the real problem is that Google forces you to sign in to your browser with your Google account?

indeed, this is one of the many reasons I don't use Chrome (except sometimes for buggy web pages that don't work properly in firefox, sigh).

You guys don't just use different browsers for this :D?

I've got Firefox, Opera and Chrome and each one has different logins :D gotta be honest, didn't even know Chrome and FF can also do that!

I do, but your common office drone isn't even aware that there are options.

Firefox has a really poor implementation of multi-profile compared to chrome though. There's no built in way to create shortcuts for each profile, no profile switcher icon on the toolbar, etc... Not to mention how much of a PIA it is to get windows to pin multiple firefox shortcuts for different profiles to your taskbar and get them to behave properly.

Edge's multi-profile support blows them both out of the water though, with the ability to right click tabs and move them between profiles, automatically open links for certain domains in certain profiles, being able to set a default profile for external links, etc...

I would use Firefox profiles if it were easier.

What does “easier” mean in that context? You just need to enable it once, and then you get a prompt every time you start the browser, almost like in Chrome in fact… Enabling it for the first time is less intuitive than it could/should be but since everybody just googles “how to use Chrome profiles” without trying to figure of out by themselves, it's not too big of a difference…

Try this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

Not GP, but this extension seems to only allow switching profiles. Is there something that allows opening a new window using a different profile? People who use Chrome with multiple profiles may have multiple windows open at the same time, with some windows using (or possibly) sharing profiles.

You can directly launch a firefox profile with "firefox -p 'profile-name'"

This will create a separate firefox instance running with that profile. It's not as nice as having a button in firefox to accomplish this, but if you use different shortcuts or keyboard commands to launch things it works quite well.

Also, adding the option "-no-remote" allows you to open a new profile that way when Firefox is already running.

Great, so why I can't just do this from within the Firefox UI in a nice way? I use terminal/CLI stuff all the time, but when it comes to my GUI desktop I would rather avoid this kind of messing around. Plus, it's definitely not going to get people to switch from Chrome.

You can, just go to the `about:profiles` page.

> Plus, it's definitely not going to get people to switch from Chrome.

Given that it's only enabling multiple profiles that require such a step (afterward you get a GUI prompt at start-up), you just Google “how to Firefox profiles” once, follow the steps and call it a day. In fact, most people would need to do the same googling if they wanted to use multiple chrome profiles as well…

That's a good call on Windows systems, or -new-instance depending on usage.

In my linux setup, I removed the -no-remote option for some forgotten reason.

No sharing, but I can easily open different profiles in a new window in about:profiles (I rarely use profiles, preferring containers, so I don’t care about other ways to open/switch profiles)

It allows running multiple profiles at the same time. You can't open links from one into the others though, which I'm sure Chrome doesn't do either.

"Additional software is required for this extension to function, you will be prompted to install it after installing the extension."

Yep, sadly Firefox requires external shims if you want to open binaries from the host machine (which in this case is the browser executable with a different profile).

Why are they not easy? You go to "about:profiles" and click the "launch profile in new browser." You don't have to install an extension or remember to start-up with a particular command line option.

Compare that page and how you get to that page to Chromium's profiles UI and you'll understand what the problem is.

So your argument is, most people don't need it so it's justified that the UX is horrible?

The profile UX on Chrome is almost as horrible as it is on Firefox from a user's perspective, namely you need to reinstall all your addons and have no shared history so you need to check twice every time you're looking for something. The only difference is that on Chrome, it's the only way to have two different accounts on the same site, whereas on Firefox you generally don't need it unless you need the highest level of separation.

Profiles and Containers are different things.

If more people understood this, we would be asking for better profile support on Firefox and for container support on Chromium, not suggesting containers to people who need profiles or trying to use profiles as if they were tab containers.

I want profiles because they provide exactly what you mentioned: separation. I need different extensions, bookmarks, history, etc. And inside each profile I can use containers if I want to.

If you want profiles and not containers, you can use profiles too in Firefox, it works well (I do it on the shared family computer). It's just not what most people use profiles for in Chrome, which lacks the separation between profiles and container.

> you can use profiles too in Firefox, it works well

So explain me:

1. How do I set up a new profile in Firefox. In Chrome creating a new Profile takes 3 clicks and entering a name.

2. How I open two instances/windows of Firefox at the same time each with a different profile. In Chrome opening a second profile is two clicks (when Chrome is already running)

Type about:profiles in the address bar, and then you're one click away from both of your questions.

And that's the point: No normal user will ever discover that feature

Normal user don't explore the menus trying to discover the stuff they might like.

They either get hinted by someone else about “some cool feature”, or do a Google search if they know what they're looking for.

meh. installing extensions. i'm too old for that.