What is the point of browser profiles?

Privacy Questions
1

Browsers on desktop has the option to use different profiles. Are there any privacy and security benefits to this even when all cookies are isolated and sandboxed?

2

Probably not, the main reason they exist is for different users or so you can switch quickly between different configurations.

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3

You can use different profiles for different purposes. For example: I use one for online shopping only, another for personal things, another for streaming only, and another for banking/financial stuff only.

It keeps things compartmentalized when you can also have different settings in different profiles.

4

It depends on how you use your browser and do all the things you need to do and if at all you need any compartmentalization.

5

Privacy, yes. You get first-party to first-party isolation, separate settings, extensions and so on. A notable use case is having a separate browser profile for logins.

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6

How does this impact logins? Isn’t the only advantage the fact that you can log in to different accounts on the same website?

7

In my opinion, Profiles are useful as part of a strategy.

In and of themselves profiles don’t necessarily provide too much additional practical privacy or security beyond what state partitioning, cookie isolation or Firefox containers provide. But profiles allow you as the user/admin more flexibility in how you setup your browser. It can indirectly improve security or privacy by allowing you to make less compromises. Or to logically separate different activities or roles from one another.

The way I use profiles fall into a number of categories:

  1. My main profile and daily driver.
  2. Specific profiles for specific roles/activities
    • A profile for “shopping” (why: slightly relaxed privacy settings compared ot my main profile, only light anti-fingerprinting, cookies not cleared on browser close, and an extra shopping specific extension that I don’t want active in my main profile)
    • 2-3 other activity/role specific profiles with settings and extensions that make sense for each.
  3. Testing Profiles I keep a “Pure” Arkenfox, and “Pure” Firefox (and for Brave a “Pure” Brave) profile for testing, troubleshooting, and staying aware of what the defaults are.
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8

Having a separate browser profile for your logins makes it possible to use forgetful browsing for everything else and is an easy way to fight stateful tracking, while still not having to log in again and again to website which you need to log in everyday anyway.

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