Managing Firefox Profiles

So you were curious and downloaded Firefox 3.0 or the newer Minefield nightly build, but each time you atart it, it conflicts with your firefox 2.0 profile?

Not many extensions will work with the new version, Firebug works though, so it should be installed using a separate profile. This is ideal since it will prevent many issues that might arise out of running both firefox 2 and Firefox 3 with the same profile. Did I mention Firefox 4?

First identify you profile location. The default locations are these:

• Windows Vista/XP/2000 - %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
• Windows 98/Me - C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
• MacOS - ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/
• Linux - ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/

The xxxxxxxx represents a random string of 8 characters.

Next make a copy of the profile an move it wherever is convenient. Doing a backup at this point will prevent loss of settings, boomkarks, and passwords, and should be done on a regular basis anyway.

On Windows create a shortcut of Firefox, copy it on the desktop, then right click it and chose properties. Chose the second tab named Shortcut. In the target field add this at the end: -no-remote -profile “path_to_your_new_profile”. Now each time you start Firefox with this shortcut it will use the new profile you created.

On the other operating systems running it with the -no-remote -profile “path_to_your_new_profile” argument will do the trick.

Having more than one profile is also the right thing to do if you have more than one member of your family using the same computer. Name the new shortcut created whatever you want, but make sure it reflects the profile, or user.

As for me, I’m running four Firefox 2, one Firefox 3, and also the Minefield build. In case you haven’t tried Firefox 3 yet, you should, since it’s pretty stable and has many features that make it worthwhile.

Get Firefox 3 from here.