How to manage Firefox profiles

Being such a smart browser, Firefox uses a very clever method to store your user information. It’s called profile and it’s a set of files where Firefox saves all your bookmarks, browsing history, extensions, passwords and personal settings.

Your Firefox profile is stored in a different location from the browser’s program files, to avoid any possible harm. These are their default paths:

Windows XP/2000: %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
Windows 95/98: C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\

But probably the easiest way to access them is by opening the Start menu, clicking on the Run command and entering this: firefox –ProfileManager. In this way you’ll open the Firefox Profile Manager, from where you can check all the available profiles on your computer, customize the way Firefox handles them and also create new profiles.

Now why would you want to create another profile? Two possible answers come to mind: one, separate profiles are an excellent way to get to test new Firefox versions when they’re still at a very early stage of development (and therefore, quite unstable); and two, profiles also allow you to have completely different Firefox settings and configurations for two or more different users, which is really useful when you share your PC – and your browser – with the rest of the household.

When managing multiple Firefox profiles, you can create desktop shortcuts to launch Firefox with each one of them. Simply add this text in the target field, after the executable path: -P Profile_Name (obviously replacing the “Profile_Name” bit with the actual profile name you want to load in each case). You can also uncheck the “Don’t ask at startup” option in the Profile Manager, so that the browser asks you which profile to use every time you launch it.