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support firefox profiles best as possible

Profile support for ffox on the mac is a bit opaque, but I use it to keep a completely separate environment for e.g. online banking.

From the shell ".../Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -ProfileManager" lets you create new profiles, and then ".../Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -ProfileManager -P ProfileName" will launch firefox with a particular profile.

When you launch ffox this way, you can have multiple copies of it running at the same time. I don't really expect choosy to know what to do here automatically (prompt maybe?).

However, when you quit any ffox instance Choosy loses track of the other running ffox processes and no longer shows a check next to it in the menu. This I consider a bug... I have to exit and relaunch either choosy or ffox for it to start sending urls to ffox again.

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under review  ·  Admingeorgebrock (Admin, Choosy) responded  · 

I would love to support Firefox profiles in the same was as Chrome profiles (where each profile can be treated as a distinct browser). Unfortunately, that hasn’t been possible to achieve so far.

Firefox does have command line arguments that can be used to launch a new instance of the browser for a specific profile, but once it’s running there’s no way I can find to control which profile a newly opened link will be sent to (the closest I’ve been able to get is forcing Firefox to start a another new instance for the profile, which opens the link in the right profile, but also causes the previous profile instance—and any windows or tabs it had open—to quit).

I’ll keep coming back and reviewing this—maybe it will become possible in future Firefox versions.

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  • Thomas commented  ·   ·  Report

    Hi George,

    i've just revisited the topic and I think the situation has improved in Firefox. I'm running 111.0.1 and this works now:
    firefox -P <PROFILE> --new-tab "https://example.com&quot;

    As expected from the command line, it will open the URL in a new tab. When a browser with that profile is already running, the command will exit after the tab has opened. When it's not running yet, the command will start firefox and block until firefox is quit. Not ideal perhaps, but managable. Can you confirm? Would love to see this as a feature.

    Best,
    Thomas

  • Michael Butler commented  ·   ·  Report

    Tip for workaround: Install Firefox Beta, Dev Preview, or Nightly (Beta for the least "risky") alongside regular Firefox, then you should be able to assign a unique default profile to it, then use Choosy to just use Firefox or Firefox Beta to launch specific URLs.

  • Derek commented  ·   ·  Report

    Curious if this looks plausible in any near future?

    (Trying to avoid Chrome these days for probably all the obvious reasons in favor of Firefox, but the Choosy feature of being able to choose whether to send links to my personal or work browser may be enough to send me back...)

    And, as ever - thank you for the awesome app.

  • Chris commented  ·   ·  Report

    not sure if its possible or helps but...
    Is it possible to get a list of all running process ID's for firefox and then use something like 'lsof' to see what files they have open. Then maybe using that list you could see which has a given profile open to know which pid to target?

  • Jesús Dugarte commented  ·   ·  Report

    Hello! Has anything been done about this? I'm looking for a way to choose between two Firefox profiles when I click in a link. Thanks!

  • Chris commented  ·   ·  Report

    I use a different firefox profile for each project I work on. Right now I use MultiFirefox to make this more seamless.

    If Choosy would allow me to specify which profile based hostname/url etc... that would make a seamless experience.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    agreed. I'd buy choosy if it supported firefox profiles, but for now I'm giving up on it.