Browser profile

Also called: user-data directory, browser container.

A browser profile is a directory. Everything a site can write goes into it — cookies, local storage, IndexedDB, the HTTP cache, service-worker registrations, permission grants — along with the browser's own settings and extension state. When people talk about a profile as an identity, that directory is the whole of what they mean, because it is the whole of what a site can read back on the next visit.

In an anti-detect browser the profile carries two more things: the device characteristics it presents and the network route it takes. That is the difference between a profile and a container extension, which partitions cookies while every partition still runs in the same process, on the same installed extensions and the same hardware fingerprint. In Argus a profile is a separate user-data directory the browser is pointed at when the session starts, with session restore disabled so a previous run cannot resurface in a new one, plus its own generated fingerprint and its own assigned proxy. The profiles page covers what a list of hundreds of them needs — folders, tags, statuses, bulk operations — and profile isolation covers the boundary itself.