Allow me to hide additional profile app icons

hungryDev89 If that change was made would you also expect all the profiles to be merged into a single Orion icon in the ⌘-Tab switcher?

Hmm... I don't know as much about macOS's frameworks so correct me if Im wrong here, but is it possible to rework it as possibly either a menubar process or even a system process that isn't user facing? The end goal is to declutter but if it means sacrificing the ability to sandbox data then I'd rather keep the current implementation.

adamaveray yes I believe so. I use alt-tab due to apples stubbornly flawed tabbing design so I totally forgot about this kind of scenario. If thats the case, I would also like to be able to switch between profiles using the ctrl - Tab feature but again this maybe going out of scope for the original idea here.

hungryDev89 I don't think it's technically possible on macOS for an app to present as a single item in the dock while having multiple entries in the ⌘Tab switcher (apps can hide their dock icon but I am fairly sure that also removes them from the ⌘Tab switcher so they become only accessible via clicking, Mission Control, etc - not via the keyboard) so the only options are either the current Orion implementation of each profile as a separate app therefore accessible from anywhere with ⌘Tab, or making profiles separate windows of the one unified Orion app instance therefore accessible with ⌘~ after first activating Orion.

Worth keeping in mind that while you might find the macOS ⌘Tab vs ⌘~ window navigation system (stubbornly?) flawed many people – myself included – vastly prefer it to e.g. the Windows approach of no distinction between apps and windows. Similarly I find multiple icons in the dock a benefit not a negative in addition to the functionality Orion's profiles being separate app instances provides including independent toolbar layouts, tab arrangements, app icons, preferences, etc, so whatever approach they choose will inevitably disappoint some people.

I guess it's up to the community to decide which approach they prefer to help the Orion team decide whether to make any changes.

also to provide some context, on windows, chrome creates a different app icon in the taskbar for every profile

I think the current behavior (icon for each profile) is pretty good for my experience, I have no need to right click to open specific profile in Safari (or Chrome).

Is there any performance or resource eficiency advantage if this things implemented? If yes, I prefer the performance over the experience.

there should be no perf difference

Even if Windows offers this possibility, the traditional behavior of applications on MacOS, and Apple's interface guidelines remind us, is to have an application open only once, with a single icon in the Dock. To have multiple instances, just open new windows in the app. This is what Safari 17 does and respects with its profiles feature.
I think Orion should take this principle (there are still ways to improve and offer something different from what Safari 17 offers while respecting the principle).

There can potentially be a few performance consequences (defining what is meaningful for an Apple Silicon machine), this can protect other profiles if a profile/website/... crashes and allow continued use of Orion (if we have multiple profiles open at this precise moment), but these are generally rare phenomena in our daily use; which in any case does not prevent the crashing of the profile and its relaunch, and there are mechanisms to find our sites/profiles etc. precisely in the event of a crash.

The keyboard shortcut command+tab would certainly no longer directly offer the different instances/windows of the profiles but only the Orion application (same principle as for the other macOS applications) but it would still be possible to access the Dock directly via the icon of 'Orion has all open profiles (which Safari 17 offers) :

Also, advanced command+tab users are usually already using utilities to enhance this functionality and directly access a window, profiles, etc. (apps like Command-Tab Plus, BetterTouchTool, for example).
And Orion's "Session tabs" feature, combined with profiles, I think already answers a large part of the problem of the data sandbox.

Profile management in general could take some cues from Arc. I do like that each profile is its own browser process, however being able to open certain sites/domains in certain profiles to keep things containerized would be great. Facebook in its own profile, Google its own, Microsoft stuff in its own etc ... keeps the tracking to a minimum and lets a set of preferences, favorites etc apply to each.

Hoosadam You're likely looking for https://orionfeedback.org/d/43-something-like-firefox-multi-account-containers-by-default/92

I see the discussion has gone back and forth, but I am coming from Brave with different "data-dir" profiles, so that I can Cmd+Tab into different profiles. This would be paramount to keep if profiles get reworked in any way. Otherwise profiles will just be tabs, which will be comingled with other tabs from other profiles, making this hard to tell apart.

Ff4h5m9vc2 You are probably looking for sessions (which are different than profiles, but work more like Firefox multi-account containers.) You can have multiple isolated sessions within isolated "profiles". Here is Vlad's mockup.

Ff4h5m9vc2 The dock icon is entirely optional and you can remove it in profile settings.

Ff4h5m9vc2 You are right, my bad. Only badge can be removed.

Would also love to see this implemented as well!! I love the separation of several profiles, but having multiple icons in the dock gets cluttery. One icon for several profiles like how chromium has it would be great down the road.