Comment by Hello71
8 years ago
Firefox has had profiles since at least 0.8, released in 2004, when it was renamed from Firebird, more than four and a half years prior to Google Chrome's release. This code, however, was inherited from Netscape Communicator 4, released more than a decade before Google Chrome. Hell, Netscape 4 predates Google!
However, since the profile code is so old, it is not accessible from the main interface; it must be accessed via a command line flag. Chrome learned from this mistake and exposed it in the graphical interface.
It is utterly false however to say that Firefox does not support profiles.
Firefox also has Multi-Account Containers add-on which is much more lightweight than profiles: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
Ah, yes, I forgot to mention that. This is basically Firefox learning from Chrome's mistakes after 10 years, just as Chrome learned from Netscape's mistakes. Chrome added in-browser support to profiles, then Firefox added preference and add-on sharing.
I don't quite understand your comment. I think you are assuming that Firefox's containers are like Chrome's profiles, but they're not.
I just wanted to add that I regularly run many different Firefox profiles in parallel, and it definitely supports that feature.
Granted the UI could use some work, but if you make a shortcut that brings up the profile selector it works pretty OK.