There's countless people who have screamed that they want to switch from chrome, but can't because profiles don't work the way we want them too. And it's two seemingly small changes that need to happen too.

1. Make the UI around profiles better 2. When I click a link anywhere outside of the browser, open it in the last active window.

Number 2 is the most important honestly

Many people don't know that Profiles is carried over from Netscape 3.x days (IIRC).

Code powering Profiles is probably is much more convoluted than people have realized.

Addendum: The earliest reference I can find is around 2000 (https://math.vanderbilt.edu/schectex/wincd/tips_netscape.htm), which coincides with Netscape 3/4 era.

And, if I remember correctly, the whole Profile things was initially hidden in Firefox. I remember you couldn't easily switch profile without using the command line.

Yes, it was there, but not really supported. We had to (ab)use the feature for some stuff, but everything was read-only and locked down by enterprise profiles, so it was not a big problem for us.

I think profiles are not supported as first class citizens, still.

Shall that be improved? Yes. Will that be easy? I don't think so.

If they have the resources to constantly revamp the Firefox and Thunderbird UIs, they have the resources to rewrite the profile system.

UI reboots are so sexy though -- if this is like any company I've been involved with, they hire/promote a new design boss every couple years, and that person spends 6 months making a sexy Illustrator/Sketch/Figma (in that order over the years) document showing how hott things would look if we changed all the fonts and aped whatever widgets had been redone in last year's iOS. Instant greenlight. Try getting that kind of C-suite buy-in for a boring under-the-hood fix!

This constant redesign with no real improvement cycle irritates me to no end.

Actually Thunderbird Supernova and Firefox’s latest iteration all very good both in space efficiency and performance.

I’m saying this as a lover of 90s dense interfaces, like Eclipse.

Did you see the code? Do you know how deep it goes? I don't have the definitive answer, so if you have some insight, I'll love to hear it.

UI is top of the proverbial iceberg. It's relatively easy to modify it.

I'm using Firefox on Linux and 2 is how it's been working for me for a looong time now. Clicked links in external programs always open in the last active Firefox window for me. Is this OS or even window-manager specific?

I think they mean they have windows open in different profiles (profiles, not containers), and want the last active one to pick up links from external apps...

I, for one, would like the last active container to be used.

Interesting. I like the option which Edge gives, which is I select the profile that gets URL opens from outside the browser (my "main work profile") and add site-level exceptions that route certain sites to the right profiles (example: LinkedIn links should open in my personal profile, Demo Server accounts open in the dedicated demo profile).

If I relied on "last active" I would frequently get things opening up in the wrong place just because say, last time I was in a browser I happened to be in a my personal profile, and 30 minutes later, I click a link in work Slack.

Yeah, I can see how that can end up messy, but filtering by url also doesn't always work. To give one example: I may open google docs in different containers because I have several accounts (personal and work). So, if I receive a link to a doc that was shared to me, and open it from the mail client... it won't necessarily end up in the right container. It can end up working fine when you use the menu to open in another container, but on many sites, the original url is redirected to a login page or whatever and opening in another container is not going to be helpful at all because you've now lost the original link you needed to open.

You can do that with sidebery. Firefox’s default container plug-in is just a baseline. Other plugins do a much better job.

Are you using different profiles ? I have two running at the same time, links always open in the browser instance running the "default" profile, not the other one.

i also have two profiles. i noticed that for me links open in the profile that was started last. in my case i always want them to open in the default profile, so i have to make sure to start the other profile first, and default second.

this may not be easy to fix.

the problem here is how the url opener selects the process.

at that point it can't even know which process has the last active window. it would have to connect to both processes and request that information instead of just sending the url to the most recent process in the list. and then each process would have to return when it was last active to be able to choose which one of these was active more recently. this may not be possible without some more elaborate book-keeping of timestamps when a window gets activated.

this increases the complexity of the url opening feature in a non-trivial way.

it may not even be desirable to handle this in firefox only.

what if you run chromium and firefox? now you want a generic url opener that sends the url to the last active browser.

what we really want here is to have a generic way to send an url to an open window.

> at that point it can't even know which process has the last active window. it would have to connect to both processes

Forgive me as I'm not a "real" desktop programmer, only web technologies really, but...

Is there not some master process that knows the basic details about its various separate processes? I mean, the main process has to be able to tell the others to quit, right? I would have thought it could keep track of the metadata of each for coordination purposes, like, as a process's window becomes Front it could check in and say 'yo this is process 12345, I'm profile X and I'm becoming Active.'

i don't know how wayland does it, but one of the challenges in X11 was that it was not trivial or even possible to relate an X11 window to its unix process because the window could be coming from a remote machine. in other words X11 knows nothing about unix processes.

kill in X11 is done by sending a message to the window to go away. in the normal case this triggers an exit in the process, but it is possible for the process to keep running or even open a new window. X11 can not force a program to really terminate because again the process could be from a different machine or a different user.

there are two ways to talk to a process: one is to find the X11 window and send messages to it through the X11 protocol. this is done for example to share clipboard contents. it would be possible to send urls that way too.

the other is to find the unix process, and use some rpc mechanism to talk to it that way.

as far as i can tell, firefox is using the unix process. this may be because of the cross platform nature of firefox. process RPC is easier to do in a cross platform way. the X11 method does not work on windows or MacOS, so that would mean that each system needs custom code to handle this.

I got tired of dealing with it and just told my system that URLs should be opened by a script I wrote that just puts the URL in the clipboard and shows a notification that it did so. So I open/click a link, then go find the window I want it to open in and paste and go.

If you want to avoid that, but have control of where urls are opened (and use a mac);

https://github.com/johnste/finicky

Containers are enough for your use case. I know that for some usage cases, are enough. But for nearly 90% users, they are enough and even better that profiles.

You sure?

What I want to do is sandbox my accounts, specifically my work account. Here's a sceneario

I click a link in slack, I want the link to open in the work container.

How do I do this?

Because using containers, It will default open in the default container, i then have to right click the tab, and say "open in work container" .. which then opens that tab again, in the Work Container.

What I want is to not have to do that extra work. Click link -> Work Container.

You can't, at least, not default... you need to add extra plugins, like Multi-Account containers or whatever the plugin is called. That's a LOT of work for the average user. Compared to profiles where when you click the link, it opens in the last active window, which remembering windows are profiles, will be most likely the right profile. So if im working constantly on my work profile window, i click slack, and then click a link, its right back where i want.

The problem with container tabs, is that its tabs, not windows. So is there any way i can say to firefox "this new window is WORK Containers please"

Looks like there's an extension which adds a new protocol handler, which allows firing the container you like for a given link from the command line.

It's available at https://github.com/honsiorovskyi/open-url-in-container and Mozilla Extension store, so you can directly install it.

I think you can register a new "application" to open links, not set at default, and use Right Click -> Open With -> Firefox (WORK CONTAINER).

Will that work?

This is exactly the reply I was expecting. The "yes it works but here's some extra things you need to do to make it work". No average user is going to do that.

To me containers still don't replace profiles.

Last week I was at a project meeting cum conference, where most people attending were scientists, but not computer people. They have showed what they did with computers and programming languages, and it amazed me with no end.

These people wired tons of plugins on their browsers, VSCode and Obsidian installations, created web sites and tools which broke new ground and their tools were running on distributed systems at very good speeds. Some of these tools requires human years to develop even by “computer people”, yet these people sat with their partners during the pandemic and developed these amazing things while wearing trainers and drinking coffee casually.

These people would make this plugin draw circles up in the air while most of us “not average users” are reading the docs.

So, what is an average user? By your definition I’m an average user, because I use containers, but I didn’t use this extension, but found it in five minutes, because you wanted a solution.

Now I’ll install and use it fully tomorrow morning, before my coffee gets warm. Because it’s worth it.

Yes this! This is the main thing stopping me moving.

The ux is currently horrible because you have to run multiple copies of the browser