Jun
11
2008

The Power of Firefox Profiles

The poster child of the OSS comunity and everybody’s favorite browser Firefox has a powerful weapon in its arsenal against internet explorer, namely the extensibility provided by “Addons”. Using addons, firefox can take any Avatar, from being “just a good browser” to being a “complete social browser (flock)” to being a “fully customizable web development IDE” to being a “fully featured productivity and communication tool” and so on… I personally use a lot of addons related to web development and social bookmarking.

But with great power comes greater problems. The use of a lot of addons leads to clutter resulting in reduced viewspace… which sucks. Also lots of addons running in background reduces the performance. Is there a solution to this seemingly unavoidable problem?

The solution comes in the form of a hidden feature of Firefox called “Profiles”. It comes to bear on the fact that we don’t always want all the addons all the time. Like, we don’t need the web developer addon when we are browsing normally. Using the “Profiles” feature of firefox, we can create multiple profiles each with its own set of extensions, themes, bookmarks, history, password, options etc,. Shown below is an example of two different profiles in my computer.

What’s possible ….

Create different profiles for different uses like web developement, browsing, etc,.
Create secure profile without any addons exclusively for financial transactions, banking, etc,.
Create hidden profiles with hidden profile folder locations for other nefarious activities you dont want others to find out.

What not possible …

Running multiple profiles simultaneously. You need to close all firefox windows to start another profile. Otherwise, even if you try to start a different profile, only a new window in the currently running profile opens.

How to create…

So enough of the talk. Now that I’ve told what you can and cannot do with this feature, let me go ahead and give you a short walkthru on how to create and use profiles.

In this example, I am going to create a seperate profile for web development.

STEP 1: Open Firefox Profile Manager

The Firefox Profile Manager is used to manage all profiles. To open the profile manager, click Start>Run and in the Run Window type “Firefox.exe -P” as shown.

The Profile manager opens.

The Profile manager can be used to create, delete, rename and start profiles. When “don’t ask at startup” option is selected, then clicking on a normal firefox icon will start the profile that is highlighted in the manager.

STEP 2: Create a new Profile

Click on the “Create Profile” button to start “Create Profile Wizard”. Click next.

Enter a name for the profile. In the example I’ve used the name “DevFox”. Below you can choose your Profile folder location. You can either use the default location indicated or choose your own secret location. Click Finish.

Now you can see the new profile in the Profile Manager window. Now you can start the new profile by selecting it and clicking “Start Firefox”. Now you can customize the new profile from scratch.