Long time Firefox user here. I am moving ALL my browsing over to Brave, just can’t stand the political posturing of FF any more, not to mention Brave being functionally better for my needs.
But I do miss using profiles in FF to separate my browsing (and bookmarks etc) a little.
Is that possible in Brave, and if not, is it something that could be possible in the future?
Thanks
Yes, you can (only on desktop).
Three strips menu → Create a new profile.
Thanks so much for that GREAT news!!
I just found that and tried it. WOW!
Can i just ask… is this much like FF, i.e. the profile is COMPLETELY ISOLATED (i.e. for privacy and security issues), so the activity in one browser is totally separated from the default profile?)
Brave is just SO damn cool. Why didn’t I make this shift sooner?! Thanks again
I believe yes, CMIIW. As it’ll create a new profile with it’s own settings. cc @Mattches for confirmation.
Just to jump in here – for the most part yes, ‘settings’ per se will be separated by profiles.
However there are some that are shared.
For instance, most ‘flags’ (brave://flags) seem to be shared across profiles. And, some regular settings such as Secure DNS also are shared.
I wish there were a good document outlining what’s shared, and what isn’t, but I haven’t seen one thus far. I’m not sure if there’s any rhyme or reason to it, it seems to be more like ‘under the hood’ types of changes are shared. But you can experiment to track things down if you want by having 2 profiles open, changing a setting in one, and see if it changes in the other one.
That said, if you do want to separate even those settings as well as flags, you can start a new instance with a different storage location using the --user-data-dir CLI option. Probably not necessary for most use cases but YMMV.
@JimB1 is correct here — I believe it is only flags that carry over across profiles. That said, IMO they should not and I’m not entirely clear as to why they do carry over. But yes as other users pointed out, outside of that exception a new profile will be essentially “new” and not have any settings or data carried over from any other profile(s).
Follow up question, just curious…
Is it possible to set Brave so that any new profile created automatically adopts more aggressive privacy settings, i.e. my custom settings used in my main profile?
Rather than having to set each one up manually through settings screens?
Or maybe there’s an export facility to import those settings?
thanks
Not sure. There is probably a way to do it but haven’t really thought it through thoroughly. If I had to guess, I would think you could set up a new and clean profile the way you want it, then copy the profile folder it lives in, and then when you want to clone it just create a new profile the usual way and then replace the content with the stuff you copied.
Also not sure if that is sustainable – you’d basically be making copies of ‘old’ profile data and over time the browser will move on and change, and at some point the data you’re copying could be obsolete.
But, another idea might be to still create a clean profile and set up Brave Sync to send its Settings into a Sync chain. Then later, if you want to duplicate it, create your new profile and temporarily hook it onto the same Sync chain. Then remove it from that chain so each of them again becomes independent. I have not tested this but in my shallow mind it seems like it could work out pretty well, and be sustainable.
I like your thinking, thanks! I don’t really fancy using sync but it’s a neat idea!
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