I thought it had had that for twenty years?
I think they are just making a ui to manage it natively.
I tried it during covid when wfh started. I found it really annoying to switch between personal and work profiles. I prefer the chrome way of asking which profile each time I click the icon or having two separate icons.
Impressive that theyre finally adding a feature that ive already been using. Makes you wonder how they do that
Quite. It’s how I’ve been watching YouTube ad-free for ages.
I already use profiles in Firefox but this looks a much better interface for managing them.
Feels super strange to read this. They had profiles for what, decades now? It just required a simple command line flag.
I mean, this is better, but… Yeah.
about:profiles always worked for me. And the profile manager. I don’t need a 3rd ui for switching profiles.
Uhm … is this perhaps for the android browser then?
The desktop browser has had this for a long long time, though in recent builds a bit hidden. I still use various profiles, very handy.
Why would I use this when I have Firefox containers?
It’s the same as about:profiles
Just an easy way to separate people’s browsing histories, cookes, bookmarks, etc I guess. And you can have them sync independently as well. For if other people want to use the same computer
That makes sense. The bookmarks and settings kinda made everything fit better in my head, thanks!
It’s great having a separate profile for when you tell bbc iPlayer you have a tv licence.
But can’t containers do that? Maybe I’m missing something?
I find multi account containers to be the best workflow ergonomics when it comes to separating logins and sessions. I think having the same bookmarks, theme, etc. is actually nice. But I’m sure many really enjoy profile swapping.
profiles also allow different addons and addon configurations, default fonts, browser config, etc… it’s kinda like having a whole other user account or a whole other copy of the browser, rather than just cookie and storage isolation
Understood, which is why for my workflow, I prefer MAC. Still a good feature.
totally; and i think that’s very fair for the large majority of use-cases… most people don’t need different browser settings: they just need different local storage
This should have been a feature 10 years ago
It was.
Ironically, in the article it’s pictured running on Windows, which now has a built-in mechanic for automatically screen shotting everything you do and keeping records.
Yay.
I wish there was a feature like this on YouTube. I’d love a profile for watching educational videos, a profile for feeding me cool videos when I’m high, and a profile for when my kids want to watch stuff. I’m tired of vibing and listening to music videos only to get hit with a language learning podcast or Disney songs.
It’s insane that they have an incognito mode that still serves up ads even though I have premium.
They do have categories and I’ve tried to put different channels in different categories, but the thing is just so hard to use I gave up.
It’s quite surprising how bad Google can be at UX.
It really is wild how a company can be so massive yet unable to do basic UI. I got a notification that someone replied to a YouTube comment I made so I clicked the notification and it opened up YouTube’s landing page. I tried to find notifications and couldn’t so instead I tried to find a page that has my comment history.
I had to look it up and apparently you can’t even find it on YouTube, you have to go to a separate website, my activity.google.com.
Youtube > Profile picture > Settings > Add or manage your channel(s) > create a channel
You basically get a new “profile” with your own subs, history, profile picture, and comments and premium/channel subscriptions apply to all of them
Holy crap that’s exactly what I was looking for, thank you!!
no problem! i use it for my regular account, one for gaming, and one for dumb memes and tv clips so they don’t get mixed up in recs :)
Did you try to achieve this with containerized tabs?
tried tab groups, waste of time. trying to save my pinned tabs from disappearing. have to avoid closing single tab windows last. opens on the single tab and pins are lost. keep about 20 pinned in one window.
You can usually find recently closed windows in history.
Oh good, the current profile management is a little bit clunky. Having the option to launch random profiles wherever and whenever would be nice.
Zen has “workspaces”, which I don’t get at all. Profiles seems like too much, containers works fine for me.
Crazy all the useless nonsense Mozilla has room for, since they helped kill RSS by dropping browser UI support for it for “simplification”. It was the same rationale for removing live bookmarks and Shift+Enter to add .net to an address and Ctrl+Shift+Enter for .org.
You can assign containers to workspaces so that you can use work stuff one workspace, gaming stuff in one and so on.
It is a great feature and is the main reason I like Floorp (Firefox fork). But the UX does not look good, I think the way Floorp does is better:
https://docs.floorp.app/docs/features/how-to-use-workspaces/
