1. Make the UI around profiles better 2. When I click a link anywhere outside of the browser, open it in the last active window.
Number 2 is the most important honestly
Code powering Profiles is probably is much more convoluted than people have realized.
Addendum: The earliest reference I can find is around 2000 (https://math.vanderbilt.edu/schectex/wincd/tips_netscape.htm), which coincides with Netscape 3/4 era.
I think profiles are not supported as first class citizens, still.
Shall that be improved? Yes. Will that be easy? I don't think so.
UI is top of the proverbial iceberg. It's relatively easy to modify it.
I’m saying this as a lover of 90s dense interfaces, like Eclipse.
I, for one, would like the last active container to be used.
If I relied on "last active" I would frequently get things opening up in the wrong place just because say, last time I was in a browser I happened to be in a my personal profile, and 30 minutes later, I click a link in work Slack.
this may not be easy to fix.
the problem here is how the url opener selects the process.
at that point it can't even know which process has the last active window. it would have to connect to both processes and request that information instead of just sending the url to the most recent process in the list. and then each process would have to return when it was last active to be able to choose which one of these was active more recently. this may not be possible without some more elaborate book-keeping of timestamps when a window gets activated.
this increases the complexity of the url opening feature in a non-trivial way.
it may not even be desirable to handle this in firefox only.
what if you run chromium and firefox? now you want a generic url opener that sends the url to the last active browser.
what we really want here is to have a generic way to send an url to an open window.
Forgive me as I'm not a "real" desktop programmer, only web technologies really, but...
Is there not some master process that knows the basic details about its various separate processes? I mean, the main process has to be able to tell the others to quit, right? I would have thought it could keep track of the metadata of each for coordination purposes, like, as a process's window becomes Front it could check in and say 'yo this is process 12345, I'm profile X and I'm becoming Active.'
kill in X11 is done by sending a message to the window to go away. in the normal case this triggers an exit in the process, but it is possible for the process to keep running or even open a new window. X11 can not force a program to really terminate because again the process could be from a different machine or a different user.
there are two ways to talk to a process: one is to find the X11 window and send messages to it through the X11 protocol. this is done for example to share clipboard contents. it would be possible to send urls that way too.
the other is to find the unix process, and use some rpc mechanism to talk to it that way.
as far as i can tell, firefox is using the unix process. this may be because of the cross platform nature of firefox. process RPC is easier to do in a cross platform way. the X11 method does not work on windows or MacOS, so that would mean that each system needs custom code to handle this.
What I want to do is sandbox my accounts, specifically my work account. Here's a sceneario
I click a link in slack, I want the link to open in the work container.
How do I do this?
Because using containers, It will default open in the default container, i then have to right click the tab, and say "open in work container" .. which then opens that tab again, in the Work Container.
What I want is to not have to do that extra work. Click link -> Work Container.
You can't, at least, not default... you need to add extra plugins, like Multi-Account containers or whatever the plugin is called. That's a LOT of work for the average user. Compared to profiles where when you click the link, it opens in the last active window, which remembering windows are profiles, will be most likely the right profile. So if im working constantly on my work profile window, i click slack, and then click a link, its right back where i want.
The problem with container tabs, is that its tabs, not windows. So is there any way i can say to firefox "this new window is WORK Containers please"
It's available at https://github.com/honsiorovskyi/open-url-in-container and Mozilla Extension store, so you can directly install it.
I think you can register a new "application" to open links, not set at default, and use Right Click -> Open With -> Firefox (WORK CONTAINER).
Will that work?
To me containers still don't replace profiles.
These people wired tons of plugins on their browsers, VSCode and Obsidian installations, created web sites and tools which broke new ground and their tools were running on distributed systems at very good speeds. Some of these tools requires human years to develop even by “computer people”, yet these people sat with their partners during the pandemic and developed these amazing things while wearing trainers and drinking coffee casually.
These people would make this plugin draw circles up in the air while most of us “not average users” are reading the docs.
So, what is an average user? By your definition I’m an average user, because I use containers, but I didn’t use this extension, but found it in five minutes, because you wanted a solution.
Now I’ll install and use it fully tomorrow morning, before my coffee gets warm. Because it’s worth it.
The ux is currently horrible because you have to run multiple copies of the browser