Firefox Profile Nomenclature: Traditional vs Fancy

As someone who has been using Firefox Profiles for years, I was initially excited by the announcement of the new profile management feature. It sounded like this was promoting the existing feature with a UI refresh.

Confusingly, it’s a completely separate feature that shares the exact same name!

Let’s invent some terminology so that we can be clear:

• Traditional Profiles
  • These have been around for years.
  • They are managed through about:profiles.
• Fancy Profiles:
  • These began a gradual rollout¹ on 14th October 2025. If not yet enabled on your Firefox, go to about:config and enable browser.profiles.enabled.
  • Once enabled, these are managed through about:profilemanager and about:editprofile.

What do these two profiles look like?

Screenshots §

Traditional Profiles §

Fancy Profiles §

Closing Thoughts §

Some points to note:

• Fancy Profiles are contained within Traditional Profiles. So, it’s possible to independently enable/disable Fancy Profiles within each Traditional Profile.
• Release announcements about Fancy Profiles are curiously devoid of any mention of the long present Traditional Profiles, e.g. The Verge, even Mozilla.
• There is no official guidance on how to migrate a Traditional Profile to a Fancy Profile.
• Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is some confusion in the community.

I’m a bit disappointed by how this has been managed. The roll out of Fancy Profiles has seemingly ignored Traditional Profiles, aside from a small note here on the Mozilla docs, to suggest that if you do not yet have Fancy Profiles, you can instead use Traditional Profiles. It’s unclear what the migration path is², if there is one, and it’s confusing to have the same name for two different features.