Every time this comes up, everyone always dismisses it by just pointing to about:profile or the launch flags, but in my opinion those are weak excuses.
Chrome made profiles a first class citizen and they're an absolute pleasure to use. I literally use them every day. Firefox having a bunch of buried half baked UI isn't really an answer to that.
I believe Firefox is a better browser overall. Only this (profiles), the terrible bookmark/history experience (wtf is that?), and the developer bar are the remaining weaknesses.
The entire Library, Bookmarks/History/the archaic Downloads popup, all just makes me immensely sad. Meanwhile I keep seeing more badges (Pocket, Screenshots, Lockwise, etc) crap popping up in the browser UX...
To add on to what you're pointing out -- they even cloned Chrome's "profile-icon-in-the-bar" model, but didn't actually give you the ability to switch profiles with it! Instead more places to shove more links that I forgot about - Firefox Monitor and Firefox Send.
The history and bookmark management also has some unfortunate performance issues. I'm fairly certain there's a memory leak or something as well, as deleting several thousand entries at once (say, via 'forget this site' menu options) effectively breaks the browser until restart even when it has finished the operation.
A comment in the bugzilla for this issue[1] seems to suggest that they'd like to rewrite History at the very least. So it's on the priority list somewhere.
"Forget this site" seems to work well for me, but selecting thousands of history items manually and then pressing the delete key will lock firefox up for tens of minutes.
There is definitely something profoundly broken with how history is being handled. Probably more than one thing that's broken, from the sounds of it.
Not only that, but attempting to actually create a lunch shortcut on MacOS or Linux with custom profile is quite an exercise since it's not as intuitive to do as on Windows.
Chrome made profiles a first class citizen and they're an absolute pleasure to use. I literally use them every day. Firefox having a bunch of buried half baked UI isn't really an answer to that.
I believe Firefox is a better browser overall. Only this (profiles), the terrible bookmark/history experience (wtf is that?), and the developer bar are the remaining weaknesses.