Containers are not the solution for everything.

Here is an example, I use the website aliexpress.
I want to browse with multiple identifies, from various countries, different account and I also need to access with no cookies and no login, completely anonymous to defeat the value extraction AI aliexpress uses to show you higher margin sellers first.

With containers you can create one container to always open that website in it. But you can't choose which of all these context, you just get one default container per website. (or you have to manually manage them and it's easy to slip up and get tracked)

With multiple profile, you can name them and colour the firefox UI theme to represent which type of account this is. Anonymous/logged main/logged alt/ etc...

The problem is the profile switcher addon doesn't come as part of firefox base installation, you have to use about:profiles and it's terrible by comparison.

Profile switcher should be part of the base installation.

If you set "always open this site in this container" then it always go to that container. If you don't set that, now you have select container every time. It becomes very easy to login inthe wrong containers.

If combine that with profile switchers, you get the best of both worlds.

How?

Go to the settings under your profile, add a ✔️ to confirm you want a profile specific shortcut, it's now on your desktop and can be pinned to your start menu/taskbar.

Separate accounts with different bookmarks (both in browser and on websites used by both accounts).

Pretty ridiculous that an extension would be necessary for something that seems like an obvious inclusion to add when adding the possibility to create profiles...

Eh, it's just a couple shortcuts: firefox -P.

But I honestly don't get the point. If you want multiple users on a system, just make different OS logins. If you want different logins for different sites, just use Account Containers.

Two users using the same computer at home, so we're not going to log-out/log-in every time one of us wants to watch a video on YouTube or to check their email, with Chrome we just click on our own Chrome shortcut or hover over our own shortcut to see our own windows that are already opened. Separate profiles is the exact solution to our situation.

There's no reason data separation can't work with what I'm talking about, it's just different shortcuts for the different profiles and the associated widows stacking under their respective shortcut, it is in fact much simpler than the current Firefox implementation with one shortcut and then you need to choose a profile or you need to go to about:profile to switch and all the instances are stacked under the same shortcut in the taskbar.

Fair. For something like that containers don't work, and indeed profiles are probably the way to go. I sure wouldn't mind if about:profiles had a button to create new icon for that specific profile which then would also be in its own taskbar group, but I doubt I would want it as default for new profiles.

At any rate, having multiple profiles per same install on same Windows user poses some issues. Like what profile are links in other applications supposed to open in?

I think the few times that happens it's the first profile that has priority, in our case it doesn't really matter as it's only game launchers under my name that do that anyway.

We also have other computers just for our own stuff, it's the one connected to the TV where it's an issue.

Profile switcher is amazing
Combine with multiaccount container and container proxy, you can manage multi accounts on the same website, control multiple exit gateways VPNs for the same website and completely compartmentalize each type of activity from each other.

Combine that with separate password vaults in each profile and you can greatly tighten your security.

Like I have a banking only profile which has stripped yellow skin and it's the only profile that has access to the password manager with my finance related passwords.

Profile switcher should come out of the box with firefox because installing profile switcher addon and helper program is way too much work for normal people.

Firefox Multi-Account Containers – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-CA)

Download Firefox Multi-Account Containers for Firefox. Firefox Multi-Account Containers lets you keep parts of your online life separated into color-coded tabs.

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