Ask HN: Why are there no profiles on Android browsers?

3 points by Backslasher 2 years ago | 3 comments

I'm a heavy user of user profiles on Firefox[1] and Chrome[2]. They allow complete separation of addons, history, cookies, settings between one profile and another. I use them to separate my work context from private life context, and recently different aspects from each other (e.g. different workplaces, project research). I can't find these features in Android browsers. The best I have is using different browsers instead of different profiles, but it's nowhere as convenient.

My best theories are: 1. Android forbids creating some sort of profile management inside an app, either with playstore rules or technically (can't dynamically choose a cookie store) 2. Mobile browser development is done completely separately from non-mobile ones, and this is not a priority for the dev teams for some reason.

Do you have any insight? Is this a need shared by others or is it just me?

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles [2] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824

eimrine 2 years ago |

Probably the phones became a new PC which means being dedicated to a one person. A real PC was never a personal computer because it always needs a sysadmin for doing this or that, also a real PC is a great thing to be used by several persons.

Smartphones never need a sysadmin because all weird things are either prohibited or so easy to set up that a child can do it, no third option. I am travelling often to my friends and often I use to borrow their laptop/desktop while living in their apartments and the friends always borrow to me their PCs/Macs with ease. But nobody ever borrowed me their phone because every such a device in active use is having so much personal information that everybody is always super-bothered about something might just appear in push notifications and compromise some very personal part of their life to me.

not_your_vase 2 years ago |

I think the demand is missing. Technically there is no reason that would prevent the developers enabling this feature. But even OS-level separate user profiles are also unused by 99.9% of the users.

dcminter 2 years ago |

I think you can already enforce this (for all apps) at the OS level: https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/6191949