You don't need separate Firefox profiles for that, you can use Firefox containers.
Firefox Containers are awful.
Only firefox profiles can give you true separation.
It would have been better if Mozilla had added a better interface to profiles.
Profiles in Chrome and their ease of use (Cmd+Shift+M to open a new window in a different profile) is the primary reason I still use Chrome over Firefox. I have a Personal, a Work, and a Development profile. The development profile is where I install dev extensions like React Devtools, Redux Devtools, etc. because they require full access to all sites in order to function. I don’t do regular web browsing with devtools installed. These tools seem trustworthy, but why risk giving them access to everything I do on the web?
I’ve tried Firefox Containers and can’t find the same power and ease of use Chrome Profiles have.
Thinking over about you said, now I think I like things from the two worlds, maybe better interface to containers or even better UI for profiles, with options to overcome the containers (maybe should be better for the average user instead of having both).
For the time being, I prefer to have both options (don't have it now) but I think both can be improved.
One might argue that chromium is, but in my opinion using chromium only enforces google chrome
But I prefer profiles myself, as I have different extensions in different profiles and I get the two completely separate instances of Firefox, while containers are just separate tabs instead.
I don't think containers are awful though, they are just less useful for my use case than profiles.
Would allow greater discovery if this `about:profiles` page was exposed somewhere in preferences, but at least there is something I guess.
Any details, how do they leak?
> Only firefox profiles can give you true separation
I don't think they would help a lot against fingerprinting. (I have no idea how commonly used fingerprinting is at the moment.)
Extensions, mostly. You have to be real careful which extensions you install because extensions run at the window level (mostly) rather than the container level and see across/through containers.
Also things like auto-fill (including password suggestions); if you like that being very specific to context, then you'd want different profiles rather than containers.
I've found I've been using a mixture of profiles and containers, myself, to balance ease of access (containers are fast to launch and can auto-launch per specific sites) versus better extension control and auto-fill/etc separation.
(ETA: As for finger-printing, both containers and profiles are equal on the most common finger-printing: cookies and localStorage. Neither protects you well from IP Address tracking, which is a growing concern, but not the approach of at least the big players like Google or Facebook, yet.)
Do you have any sources or reasons for this condemnation?
Also, you can backup/restore/move profiles independently of each other.
Also, you can have different network settings for different profiles (not sure you can do that with containers).
For example I have a profile whose network connections are such that traffic is forwarded through a socks proxy (implemented via ssh). That's basically an ultra-simple vpn. I can then (via a script) automatically launch the tunnel open firefox with the appropriate profile and then exit firefox and gracefully stopping my tunnel.
I like to have several Container Tabs open all logged in to different accounts at the same time
