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by bad_user
1005 days ago
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Firefox's profiles are next to unusable for me. They are a hidden feature, and switching isn't easy (I know of about:profiles). On macOS, they also have window management issues, as the operating system regards different profiles as being entirely different apps, so quickly switching between windows doesn't work (and setting specific app icons isn't easy). On extensions, everything that has to do with Firefox's profiles requires separate programs to be installed on the user's computer. For example, PWA SSB support, which is cool, but barely works: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-fire... --- On site-specific activation of extensions, I sure hope to see the option in Firefox. For the extensions that I have installed, it doesn't seem to work yet, but you're probably right that they'll implement it eventually. |
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I understand the complaint but this is also sort of intended, right? Profiles are completely separate, they are effectively separate programs. They shouldn't be treated as shared context, they are effectively separate installations of the same program they can even be stored in different places on disk. So this seems like correct behavior?
Like, I get what you're saying, but it doesn't sound like your complaint is that profiles aren't encapsulated enough, it sounds like you want something less encapsulated and isolated than Firefox profiles. Of course you can't have an extension that manages your profiles without a separate application, extensions are completely isolated between profiles. Of course you can't share extension information between them, if Chrome allows that that's a weakness of their implementation.
I totally agree that the UX for profiles should be surfaced more (and I think that would be easy for Mozilla to do, a dropdown menu like Chrome offers would be enough). Containers themselves are hidden features in Firefox and I think that's a problem. I agree that profiles should be manageable without going to about:profiles. I'd be open for more isolation tools that sit between containers and profiles too.
But to argue that Chrome is offering more security here when from the sound of things Chrome has less profile isolation than Firefox sort of feels backwards to me. I doesn't sound like you want full isolation, what you want is a less secure version of Firefox profiles that sits between containers and profiles. That's fine, I think that's a completely reasonable ask -- but we should acknowledge that this is not the same as Firefox not offering isolation tools. Firefox does offer isolation tools, they work just as well if not (from the sound of your description) better than Chrome's tools do at actually fully isolating from each other. But it turns out that many users want profile-like tools that trade off some of that isolation and security in favor of greater usability.
The usability is an extremely reasonable complaint. But it just annoys me a little bit to hear someone saying that Chrome has more secure isolation for profiles if their complaints boil down to "Firefox isolates too well, and my OS doesn't ignore that isolation, and extension helpers don't ignore that isolation."