1383077 - Accessing Firefox Profiles from WebExtensions

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(WebExtensions :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Ahmed Memon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.115 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I was trying to write WebExtensions based Firefox Profile Switcher addon


Actual results:

I am unable to find any API within WebExtensions https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/


Expected results:

I guess, access to Firefox profiles via WebExtensions wont violate the vision

Comment 1

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Hi Ahmed, this has been added to the agenda for the July 25 WebExtensions APIs triage meeting. Would you be able to join us? 

Wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Contribute/Triage#Next_Meeting

Agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BBIZhiHG1zlQiu6744jiAYyWJLa-B0iRu9vzWypkvF4/edit#

Comment 2

[Ahmed Memon]

Hey Caitlin, I will be there.

Comment 3

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Summary of conversation at Jul 25 WebExtensions mtg: this may be provided by Firefox itself through about:profiles. Ahmed to file a new bug with a use case about preventing Canvas from working on certain websites, which is likely doable without accessing profiles. We would be interested in seeing further use cases requiring profiles and connecting with the about:profiles team.

Comment 4

[Ahmed Memon]

@jkt I was unable to understand your use-case, yesterday.

After yesterday's meeting I've come up with this use-case.

Use Case: Multiple Firefox Profiles for group of fingerprint attributes

Ideally an addon that will allow switching Firefox profiles, where each profile will contain specific set of fingerprint settings.

For instance;

Website 1 visit:
I visit this website regularly and I want to expose my fingerprints

Website 2 visit:
I would like to visit this website with Canvas disabled, specific User Agent, particular Screen size, defined list of fonts

Website 3 visit:
I would visit this website with maximum annonymity including but not limited to https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/blob/master/user.js


IMO this addon will help curious people & developers a like

Comment 5

[Felix S. Klock II [:pnkfelix, :fklock]]

I see this was resolved as WONTFIX.

There exist useful old Add-Ons that either observe or manipulate the Profile. (My particular add-on of interest is show-profile: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/show-profile/

If Profiles are to remain useful, it seems like Firefox should either natively provide the functionality of these add-ons (e.g. visual feedback about which profile is in use by the Firefox window that is currently has focus), or we should provide a WebExtension API exposing Profiles in some way...

Comment 6

[Felix S. Klock II [:pnkfelix, :fklock]]

Follow-up note: Since I see that earlier comments wanted information about particular use cases: I use multiple Firefox instances at the *same time* with different profiles.

(In particular, I need to do so to access gmail, since my mozilla email has a different google account than my personal gmail. But I have found it useful in general to be able to have multiple Firefox instances with different profiles for other reasons beyond that.)

However, it is difficult to get visual feedback about which profile is attached to the Firefox window that I am currently using. 

Before I discovered the show-profile add-on, I would actually make *separate copies* of the Firefox.app/ directory, and then manually change the icons and the name displayed in the menu bar for each copy. (This was a poor solution, mainly because the Firefox auto-update mechanism was not prepared to deal with these manual copies.)

Then after finding show-profile (as well as [fosx-label][]), I was so happy; I did not need to do my app copying hack any more.

But now the most recent versions of Firefox are incompatible with all of these add-ons, and it sounds like the WebExtensions API is too impoverished to support them?

[fosx-label]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fosx-label/

Comment 7

[Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie]

You can change the theme (light/dark/custom) per user profile.

Comment 8

[Ivan]

I don't mean to sound rude, but I am a bit taken aback by this discussion! What does it mean "unable to understand your use-case for multiple profiles"?! What is the "use case of of a browser" then?!

So, I use many Profiles simultaneously all the time for reasons of privacy and management. I may want to log in to multiple accounts with the same provider at the same time - e.g. I may want to have work and personal google accounts. Same with other sites.

I may also find it easier to manage my life with "dedicated" accounts for certain sites, as this seems to give me higher confidence against accidentally leaking info between sites/accounts.

On some sites, indeed, I may want to switch the user agent. Or use a proxy. whatever!

Many reasons why one would want to have different profiles AND use them at the same time!

Chrome, which is rather conservative, actually has a very nice menu, top-right, for managing "Personas", as they call it. FF used to be able to support extensions like that too.

OK, about:config has it all, so it is doable, but not very convenient for many profiles and frequent switches. Why not expose whatever about:config calls to the API? Is this so hard? Or unsafe? I hope it is neither!

Regards!

Comment 9

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

(In reply to Ivan from comment #8)
> OK, about:config has it all, so it is doable, but not very convenient for
> many profiles and frequent switches. Why not expose whatever about:config
> calls to the API? Is this so hard? Or unsafe? I hope it is neither!

I don't understand what you're asking for with regard to about:config.
In any case, some of the things you describe are covered by the Firefox containers feature:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

Chrome's Personas essentially switch profiles while the browser is running, but the way profiles are implemented in Firefox makes doing the same in Firefox impractical.  That's a broad issue, one that is unrelated to webextensions.

If you have a specific request, its probably best to open a new bug rather than commenting on a closed one.  But see the above note about switching profiles and if you're asking about general access to preferences from extensions see:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ#Does_the_WebExtensions_API_provide_access_to_preferences.3F