Firefox 144+ profile management

[lweiss-fairphone]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Since Firefox 144.0 there's a new way of doing Profile management. It doesn't seem to be supported right now by Browsers.

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/144.0/releasenotes/

Describe the solution you'd like

Make the different profiles show up in Browsers as with the old style profiles.

Describe alternatives you've considered

-

Additional context

[z3ntu]

(wanted to open it with this github account, oh well)

[liias]

Hi Lucas, thank you for the feature request/bug report.

@kfatehi also mentioned this recently at #337 (comment)

I'm a bit tired (and probably busy for next 3 weeks as I will be traveling), so I think I'm not taking it up myself yet, but I hope one of you might be most motivated to get involved :)

If not programming, then also (collectively) adding details to this issue will help to gather information:

• detect which profile version is in use
• command line argument for passing in profile
• discovery of profiles
• reading command line argument, name, profile image for each profile

[Xananax]

As far as I know, there's no way to invoke a specific profile from the command line with the new profile manager. I looked a lot.

My workaround is to sync the new and old profiles, and then use Browsers to launch the old profile.

The new profile are actually stored where the old profiles were stored, they're just not referenced by the old profile manager.

(saying "old" and "new" all the time is bothersome but hey, it's Firefox that decided to name the two features exactly the same)

To do this, run Firefox with -P, to open the old profile manager. Then, select "create a new profile", and instead of using the default directory, pick the directory of one of your alternate new profiles. On Arch, they are in ~/.mozilla/firefox/, but depending on your distro, they might be in ~/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox or elsewhere. The profiles follow a pattern of <string of letters>. Profile 1, <string of letters>. Profile 2, and so on.

From there on, old and new profile manager will use the same profiles. You can then open Browsers, click the little three dots in the bottom right, go to settings, and refresh the browsers. And, if everything went well, tadah.

Be sure to backup your profiles before, I am not responsible if things go bad.

[o8k57]

As far as I know, there's no way to invoke a specific profile from the command line with the new profile manager. I looked a lot.

I may be misunderstanding, but I'm currently using Firefox 146.01 on Ubuntu and have just installed browsers-software, so am looking to optimise it.

It's definitely possible to use a command to open a specific profile. I have the default and two additional profiles and use keyboard shortcuts with associated commands to open the one I want.

firefox -P "default" opens the default profile

firefox -P "anything_goes" opens the profile called anything_goes

etc.

I would really like to be able to set up rules that allow me to specify that clicking a link to a specific domain always uses a specific Firefox profile. At the moment, all I've been able to do is get it to open a list of Firefox profiles so I can select it each time. That saves a click as I don't have to specify Firefox (rather than Brave or Chrome) and then select the profile. But I'd like to understand if it's possible to eliminate that process completely with rules. Doesn't seem to be an option to select profiles in the rules interface.

[algoguy23]

The workaround @Xananax mentioned worked for me.

Just one more note, once the profiles are setup and named correctly, I had to poke ~/Library/Application\ Support/software.Browsers/config.json to get it to work, I tried editing the ff profiles manually, and then magically the app picked the rest of them up by itself.

[devedetti]

TL; DR;

mkdir -p ~/.mozilla
ln -s ~/.config/mozilla/firefox ~/.mozilla/firefox

My workaround was to create a ~/.mozilla directory and then create a symlink inside it pointing to ~/.config/mozilla/firefox.
Firefox has migrated to the XDG standard, but browsers hasn't been updated to detect profiles in the new location yet.

[bramst0ne]

i mainly use firefox and i would love to see the new profiles implemented

[Xananax]

@o8k57

It's definitely possible to use a command to open a specific profile [...] firefox -P ...

The new profile manager. You're referring to the old profile manager; the new Firefox profile manager (pictured in the OP) is what this issue is about.

@devedetti

You're referring to a different issue, that is context-specific, and is not related to the new firefox profiles.

For anyone that doesn't know what this issue is about; Firefox 144 introduced a native profile manager that is similar to the Chromium one. Profiles created this way are stored in the default profile of Firefox, and not in the firefox data directory. They are not accessible through the old profile manager (command line -P). They do not have a command to launch one or the other.

Any comment, or direction, related to launching or managing the old profiles, that have existed for years, is not related to this issue.