A look at Firefox's improved Profiles Manager that just launched

Martin Brinkmann
Jan 20, 2025
Firefox
|
14

Firefox has supported profiles for a very long time. This may come as a surprise to many users, as the visibility of the feature is lacking. Veteran users know that they can run Firefox with the parameter -p to start the profile manager. There is also about:profiles, which can be loaded in Firefox's address bar.

From a usability point of view, it compares badly against Chromium-based browsers. That is probably the main reason why Mozilla set out to improve the experience.

The new Profile Manager of the Firefox web browser has just been enabled in Firefox Nightly. This is the first step towards enabling the new manager in Firefox Stable, the version that is most widely used.

Good to know: Profiles add more to the browser than just a fresh coat of paint and a new icon. These act as independent users, which means that they have their own set of bookmarks, open tabs, installed extensions and other customizations.

Here is what you can expect.

Firefox's Profile Manager

Firefox's new profile manager in Menu

A click on the Menu-icon in Firefox's toolbar displays the new Profiles entry. Another click displays all existing profiles, an option to create a new profile, and to manage all profiles.

Firefox existing profiles

You can load any profile with a click on its name or icon. This loads the profile in a new browser window without closing the existing one.

A click on the new profile option loads the creator page. Each profile has a name, theme, and avatar that you can pick.

New Firefox Profile creator

Select the manage profile entry instead to get an overview and management options. Here you may do the following:

  • Edit any profile.
  • Delete a profile.
  • Create a new profile.
  • Toggle "choose a profile when Nightly opens".

This is the same window that opens when you keep the option to choose a profile when the browser opens enabled.

Here is how it looks.

Firefox choose a profile

Note that the profile that was used previously will be loaded when you disable the option. You may then still switch to another profile using the profile menu.

For those wondering, the old profile manager is still available. You can still launch Firefox with the -p parameter to load it, at least for now.

 

Closing Words

The new profiles entry under menu in Firefox improves the visibility of the feature. This highlights the feature to many Firefox users, which is good.

Now it is your turn. Do you use profiles in your browser of choice? If so, how many do you use and for which purpose? 

Summary
A look at Firefox's improved Profiles Manager that just launched
Article Name
A look at Firefox's improved Profiles Manager that just launched
Description
A first look at the new profile manager that Mozilla is working on. It has just been enabled in Firefox Nightly.
Author
Publisher
Ghacks Technology News
Logo
Advertisement

Tutorials & Tips


Previous Post: «
Next Post: «

Comments

  1. ineedtodie said on January 23, 2025 at 4:38 am
    Reply

    I must be the only one that likes this feature. The profile management in firefox was inconvient, especially for non techy users. it’s a good sign they are making improvements to accessibly and convenience. I doubt the legacy command lines are going anywhere.

  2. Anonymous said on January 22, 2025 at 2:56 pm
    Reply

    imho, Profile Manager is a pretty useless thing.
    You can just run Firefox with environment variable XRE_PROFILE_PATH specifying location of the profile (or via similar cmdline option). This directory can be empty (it’s an analog of fresh new profile) or already pre-existed – Firefox will create missed files anyway, so it doesn’t matter for them.
    Multiple profiles can be run simultaneously by default. MOZ_NO_REMOTE (or cmdline’s –no-remote) helps to make profiles “standalone”.
    It doesn’t create profiles.ini at all. userChrome.css can help to distinguish where is which profile if they run in parallel

  3. plusminus_ said on January 21, 2025 at 4:24 pm
    Reply

    Tenuous link, but I have recently used a secondary profile to transfer bookmarks from Kiwi to Iceraven (via floccus on the laptop browser), and I was surprised at how well Firefox Sync worked. I now use the secondary profile to send tabs from my phone to my computer (as an alternative to a Keep note full of links lol) and it works very well.

    I currently use a bookmark to about:profiles, but a manager would be nice (if only marginally more usable), whenever it comes to Dev Edition…

  4. Tom Hawack said on January 21, 2025 at 2:53 pm
    Reply

    I have but one Firefox profile but I have had to create a “dumb”, hence “clean” profile for the sake of finding the culprit of an issue. I’ve performed this only via firefox.exe -ProfileManager. Checking the profile settings in case of doubt (i.e. deleting the “dumb” profile and be sure active profile (but one here) is correctly restored, I have a look at,
    [USER]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\installs.ini and profiles.ini

    I have no need for accessing a firefox built-in profile manager. But true that I conceive its pertinence for anyone managing several (many) profiles.

  5. Anonymous said on January 20, 2025 at 9:12 pm
    Reply

    Not used FF profiles since they killed the old profile management thing, think that was back in 3.6 or something before they began the versioning circus that Chrome was using – disgusting pandering to dumbasses who expect to compare versioning numbers across different software.

    Going to wait this out a bit. Profiles have a lot of usages, with websites and browsers being so untrustworthy that even a bit of isolation helps (like one profile for stuff where you are logged in with google or whatever, another that you never ever do). You’d still get “printed”, but many things would not be there like cookies, cachetracking, url history, bookmarks, different set of addons. Probably doesn’t do anything for “personalized pricing” since they base that of some rather scary live IP address databases these days, that link you to the subscriber identity and you better believe they have big profiles on that, way beyond mere which-country-you-are-in geopricing.

    Anyway, with this being opened in the same browser instance (just a new window), I have some worries about proper separation. Literally have a VM I use just for that one purpose: separating my “titty watching PH profile” from everything else. And Chrome is not even to be thought of for that purpose.

  6. Tsami said on January 20, 2025 at 6:11 pm
    Reply

    Hoping that Firefox doesn’t remove the ‘firefox -p’ option from the browser.

    A long time ago, I created a hard link to schtasks.exe so that it became possible to pin ‘firefox -p’ to the taskbar alongside the firefox pinned icon. This provides an effective way to open any, or all, of the other two profiles without closing the one that’s already open.

    1. Tsami said on January 21, 2025 at 4:53 pm
      Reply

      Meant to say ‘hard link to firefox.exe’ not ‘schtasks.exe’. Was copying from my notes.

  7. Anonymous said on January 20, 2025 at 5:20 pm
    Reply

    Thanks for the article, Martin.
    I find the details of profiles confusing so I don’t use them.
    I know some people are masters of them.
    I do not see you as much in the new year. Any reason?

  8. Allwynd said on January 20, 2025 at 5:07 pm
    Reply

    This browser is like Windows 8-10-11. It has reached peak baseline feature count and tries to justify its existence and retain some relevancy by adding features that are beyond niche. Just like how they both change their GUI every few years to simulate a sense of development and changes when everyone tech-savvy knows that underneath it’s still the same and it only smears the eyes of the ignorant, naive and positive-biased ones.

    At this point, I don’t see what this browser can do to gain relevancy, it’s standing on its last legs and keeps losing users, because… I’m going to say the truth now … it does absolutely nothing. It’s not faster than Blink-powered browsers in loading and rendering web page contents, it’s not less-resource heavy than them, it’s also bloated with lots of features. Which actually gives me an idea of what they can do to gain some relevancy – launch a Firefox Lite version, stripped down from all features, actually rewritten almost from scratch and only with the most basic features – Sync and Extension support. If they do that, it might actually put them on the market once again. But even better it would be to release it under an entirely new name – something else animal-based, but not Firefox, because a lot of people will completely ignore it if it carries the same name, but something like Wombat or Capybara would be cool, interesting and make many people look twice.

    1. Anonymous said on January 21, 2025 at 8:41 am
      Reply

      @Allwynd
      >Which actually gives me an idea of what they can do to gain some relevancy

      Please please help them!!!

  9. Anonymous said on January 20, 2025 at 4:07 pm
    Reply

    Is this the improvement? To do what Chromium has been doing for years? wow…. sad.

    The problem with Profiles in Firefox was always that the resources were never shared, so if you opened a profile, it was like opening a new instance of the browser, that meant a lot of memory and CPU would be used for each profile.

    In Chromium, everything is shared so only the obvious Tabs and Extensions processes would have to be opened for the respective profile, so opening a profile would be like opening another set of tabs rather than opening the browser with –user-data-dir= which is what Firefox profiles feels like.

    So, did they fix that? or it is just a lipstick on the pig improvement? because the UI was whatever, if they didn’t fix the real core issue about Firefox profiles, then, it is clear Mozilla just want to do these type of changes so ignorant Firefox users will be ‘happy” when nothing is been fixed.

    1. Make Europe Great Again said on January 20, 2025 at 6:44 pm
      Reply

      Opera browser has the best profile management ever, it has never failed to me.

    2. cams1303 said on January 20, 2025 at 4:59 pm
      Reply

      Can’t believe in 2024 people are praising Chrome. No I don’t use Profiles on FF and I replaced Chrome with Brave.

      1. Tinbutt said on January 22, 2025 at 3:55 am
        Reply

        It’s 2025. And Chromium is not Chrome, it’s what Brave is based on.

Leave a Reply

Check the box to consent to your data being stored in line with the guidelines set out in our privacy policy

We love comments and welcome thoughtful and civilized discussion. Rudeness and personal attacks will not be tolerated. Please stay on-topic.
Please note that your comment may not appear immediately after you post it.