That's what I fear happening, and I will not like it.
> comparable to Chrome's experience
If I wanted to have "Chrome's experience" I would have used Chrome. Profiles is one way Firefox has been vastly better. Selecting the last used Profile is one press on Enter on startup and selecting a different one is a matter of pressing up/down a few times and pressing Enter or typing the first few (unique) characters of the profile name and pressing Enter. I can't think of a UI that would be faster, I think this has already reached the maximum UX for decades. This all works nicely, because it looks, feels and behaves like a native window (don't know if it is).
> lot less like a power user feature hidden behind a page address that people might not know ("about:profiles").
Why is everyone comparing it to the "hidden debug site" instead of the old profiles UI? Yeah no shit, about:profiles is not discoverable to the average user, much like all the other about: pages, but why would anyone not debugging the browser use it over the normal profiles UI?
> Beyond its UI having basically been frozen since Netscape Navigator 4-ish modulo XUL shenanigans?
I don't think this is a bad thing. I vastly prefer native(?-like) UI, way more over yet another Metro-UI clone with sluggish behaviour and no keyboard bindings.
> Why is everyone comparing it to the "hidden debug site" instead of the old profiles UI? Yeah no shit, about:profiles is not discoverable to the average user, much like all the other about: pages, but why would anyone not debugging the browser use it over the normal profiles UI?
"about:profiles" wasn't a debug view, it was the "normal" profiles UI; it was the only way to get to the ProfileManager without closing Firefox and reopening it with a CLI flag. For most of its life in Firefox it never had a menu item or toolbar button.
> I vastly prefer native(?-like) UI, way more over yet another Metro-UI clone with sluggish behaviour and no keyboard bindings.
Firefox has never used native controls. They were "XUL" controls for a long while, but that had several major revisions. (Netscape had some XUL predecessors, probably some port or fork of a Unix toolkit like Qt or Tk?) But the trick to XUL was it was always the same renderer as HTML for the most part. Then in the somewhat controversial at the time decision to kill off XUL Firefox moved to just HTML everywhere.
The new Profile Manager seemed to have keyboard bindings and didn't feel sluggish to me. The one loan complaint with it is that it doesn't have a way yet to surface profiles made before using the new Manager, but I assume that will come with time and expect that's one of the things to fix before the new one replaces the old one.
> "about:profiles" wasn't a debug view, it was the "normal" profiles UI; it was the only way to get to the ProfileManager without closing Firefox and reopening it with a CLI flag. For most of its life in Firefox it never had a menu item or toolbar button.
I did not knew that. I have used the ProfileManager for years and have not know of "about:profiles". Where is even the button on that page to launch the ProfileManager? I only see options to launch a specific profile or Restart with or without Add-Ons. This doesn't really look like the official page to handle Profiles and more like an afterthought.
Also about:profiles currently tells me this, because I started another profile:
> About Profiles
> Another copy of Firefox has made changes to profiles. You must restart Firefox before making more changes.
This page helps you to manage your profiles. Each profile is a separate world which contains separate history, bookmarks, settings and add-ons.
What kind of useless behaviour is that? I can't open another profile as soon as another profile was opened? Honestly the claim, that this is supposed to be the primary interface to Profiles doesn't sound believable. This seems to be more something like a diagnostic tool/power user tool to access half-way internals in the same spirit as about:processes or other about: pages.
Also opening the Profiles Manager through some other Firefox instance seems a bit pointless to me, because you normally use Profiles to have process isolation and prevent one frozen Firefox instance from blocking another to start.
> it was the only way to get to the ProfileManager without closing Firefox
You can open the Profiles Manager without closing Firefox?
> For most of its life in Firefox it never had a menu item or toolbar button.
That seems to be an easy change that doesn't need redesigning the Profile mechanism.
> Firefox has never used native controls.
I suspected that, that's why I added a question mark and "-like". I ment that it feels, behaves and conforms like a native tool and is really usable and integrated.
Also are you sure about that? Because when I change my GTK+/GNOME theme, it also instantly changes the layout, icons, colors, etc. in the Profile Manager as well as in the other Firefox Chrome at runtime. Normally only GTK+ programs do that, not even KDE programs do it and certainly not some customly rolled UI toolkit. For example programs like Google Chrome(ium) give a shit about the OS theme. So if Firefox really uses some self-made UI toolkit, than they did a REALLY good job, because it looks and behaves exactly like all the other GTK+ programs. But I always thought that Firefox uses a GTK+ fork.
That's what I fear happening, and I will not like it.
> comparable to Chrome's experience
If I wanted to have "Chrome's experience" I would have used Chrome. Profiles is one way Firefox has been vastly better. Selecting the last used Profile is one press on Enter on startup and selecting a different one is a matter of pressing up/down a few times and pressing Enter or typing the first few (unique) characters of the profile name and pressing Enter. I can't think of a UI that would be faster, I think this has already reached the maximum UX for decades. This all works nicely, because it looks, feels and behaves like a native window (don't know if it is).
> lot less like a power user feature hidden behind a page address that people might not know ("about:profiles").
Why is everyone comparing it to the "hidden debug site" instead of the old profiles UI? Yeah no shit, about:profiles is not discoverable to the average user, much like all the other about: pages, but why would anyone not debugging the browser use it over the normal profiles UI?
> Beyond its UI having basically been frozen since Netscape Navigator 4-ish modulo XUL shenanigans?
I don't think this is a bad thing. I vastly prefer native(?-like) UI, way more over yet another Metro-UI clone with sluggish behaviour and no keyboard bindings.