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Comment by testfoobar | Hacker News Reader

I particularly like Chrome profiles. I have a few profiles with their own bookmarks/histories/open tabs/etc. For example, one of my profiles is "Shopping". Another is "Work" and yet another is "Social Media".

Context switching profiles at a macro level - as opposed to intermingling work/shopping/social - is beneficial to me.

When I switch over to "Shopping", I have my tabs on whatever purchase I'm researching open. I can drop the whole project for a few weeks and resume it later right where I left off. None of it can bleed over into my "Work" profile. I like the separation. Helps keep my head clear.

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Firefox has something like this called containers. The best example is one for facebook, where any call to any facebook servers only works in the facebook container. It has similar setups as well, Work, Home, Commerce, etc.

Not quite the same. I want to set-up and tear-down entire macro groups of windows and tabs while keeping others active.

Opening my 'Shopping' profile brings up windows and tabs from where I left off. Same with "Social". When I don't want distractions, I just close those profiles. No notifications, no updates, etc. I like the separation.

Simple Tab Groups [0] + Multi-Account Containers [1] are my workflow for that exact case. Simple Tab Groups hides the tabs based on the group you're in and the Multi Account Containers can keep them segmented from a contextual standpoint.

I can't stand Chrome either and so I've been using these two together for about a year now I believe. Using a naked version of Chrome is jarring given my browser feels like it fits how I use it being setup like this.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr... [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Thanks I'll look into it.

I don't use Chrome, so I don't know what Chrome profiles are like. But Firefox also has profiles. Launch it with the -P option to open the profile manager and create additional profiles, besides the default one. Each profile is an entirely separate browser state: settings, tabs, cookies, storage, cache, etc. You can use them simultaneously. (This has existed for as long as I can remember... since 0.9 and probably back to Netscape?)

I switched from Chrome to FF as my daily driver, and miss being able to have multiple simultaneous instances with different proxy configs (via a --proxy-server="socks4://localhost:####" command line flag).

FF as far as I know does not have a way to do this as easily, you have to spin up different profiles and click through each one to configure it.

I still have chromium around for primarily this reason.

OTOH I was not able to stop Chromium from leaking DNS requests when using socks5. Only in FF I could make it happen.

Foxyproxy extension will help you there. You can also configure automatic proxy switching based on many conditions.

Firefox also has profiles, though they're not a very prominent feature and are a bit less polished as a result.

    firefox --ProfileManager

You can also type about:profiles in the address bar and launch a new profile from there.

There are many extensions which implement workspaces in FF. You can do exactly the same thing + FF containers give you separation for cookies, etc.

Yep, would love to use Safari but profiles are crucial for services you have multiple logins for (such as work and personal email).

Is that a Chrome for Mac feature? Never seen it before. Care to elavorate?

I use Profiles on Mac and Linux. Don't think Profiles work on Chromebooks - haven't really explored this.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/custom-chrome-browser-profiles...

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