What does “easier” mean in that context? You just need to enable it once, and then you get a prompt every time you start the browser, almost like in Chrome in fact… Enabling it for the first time is less intuitive than it could/should be but since everybody just googles “how to use Chrome profiles” without trying to figure of out by themselves, it's not too big of a difference…

Try this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

Not GP, but this extension seems to only allow switching profiles. Is there something that allows opening a new window using a different profile? People who use Chrome with multiple profiles may have multiple windows open at the same time, with some windows using (or possibly) sharing profiles.

You can directly launch a firefox profile with "firefox -p 'profile-name'"

This will create a separate firefox instance running with that profile. It's not as nice as having a button in firefox to accomplish this, but if you use different shortcuts or keyboard commands to launch things it works quite well.

Also, adding the option "-no-remote" allows you to open a new profile that way when Firefox is already running.

Great, so why I can't just do this from within the Firefox UI in a nice way? I use terminal/CLI stuff all the time, but when it comes to my GUI desktop I would rather avoid this kind of messing around. Plus, it's definitely not going to get people to switch from Chrome.

You can, just go to the `about:profiles` page.

> Plus, it's definitely not going to get people to switch from Chrome.

Given that it's only enabling multiple profiles that require such a step (afterward you get a GUI prompt at start-up), you just Google “how to Firefox profiles” once, follow the steps and call it a day. In fact, most people would need to do the same googling if they wanted to use multiple chrome profiles as well…

That's a good call on Windows systems, or -new-instance depending on usage.

In my linux setup, I removed the -no-remote option for some forgotten reason.

No sharing, but I can easily open different profiles in a new window in about:profiles (I rarely use profiles, preferring containers, so I don’t care about other ways to open/switch profiles)

It allows running multiple profiles at the same time. You can't open links from one into the others though, which I'm sure Chrome doesn't do either.

"Additional software is required for this extension to function, you will be prompted to install it after installing the extension."

Yep, sadly Firefox requires external shims if you want to open binaries from the host machine (which in this case is the browser executable with a different profile).

Why are they not easy? You go to "about:profiles" and click the "launch profile in new browser." You don't have to install an extension or remember to start-up with a particular command line option.

Compare that page and how you get to that page to Chromium's profiles UI and you'll understand what the problem is.