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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

What an extremely confusing blog post! I don't understand why it seemingly presents profiles as a new feature? Firefox has had profiles for years. What the heck is new?

I had to click the other link https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management to understand that this is all about simple UI improvements to make it easier to work with existing profiles.

The blog post is more than confusing, it is misleading. HN should link to the support page instead of the blog post.

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100% agree. It feels like Firefox has had an identical announcement of this as a new feature every second major release for the last ~2 years.

They are seriously dropping the ball here in terms of communication and it just makes Firefox seem stale.

> Firefox has had profiles for years. What the heck is new?

Even further back — Netscape had profiles! https://web.archive.org/web/20000816175642/http://help.netsc...

It looks like AI slop to me. "Profiles in Firefox aren’t just a way to clean up your tabs. They’re a way to set boundaries, protect your information and make the internet a little calmer." - classic meaningless comparison.

If it's buried in about:config, it's not a feature, it's just a dev tool. (FWIW, I read that config settings may reset during updates, so at best it's just a temporary patch.)

It's like saying you have a responsive website, but only if I edit the layout in the DOM.

Nit: It's not a parameter in about:config, it's been available for a while under about:profiles, no tweak needed

And now they're rolling out a new UI for it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management

I've been using profiles for 15 years and I didn't even know it was in about:config.

Just add -p in your shortcut to start on the profile manager.

No, you use it in the ProfileManager, which is a GUI that pops up on start.

For some reason neither my Dark Mode add-on nor the built in reader mode (which also makes pages dark as I prefer) work on that page. Very annoying; will skip reading that to preserve my eyes.

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