Working with several Firefox profiles

Most Firefox users strangely work only with one Firefox profile. Well, I should not say strangely because one profile is of course sufficient for most tasks. I however prefer a different way of working with Firefox. I use several profiles that all aid me in certain situations that I encounter regularly. It takes an additional second to start a profile instead of starting Firefox directly but that is not problematic if you use two shortcuts that start Firefox, one that starts the browser normally and one that provides the profile manager to choose a profile to start.

The four profiles that I’m currently using are default, secure, seo and test. The default profile is the one that I’m working most of the time with. It contains some solid add-ons like Adblocker, CS Lite and several others that I need during my default sessions. The secure profile is using many add-ons that add security to Firefox. I use that profile only to visit my bank’s websites and other secure sites, mostly financial websites.

The SEO profile uses several huge add-ons like Firebug, Rankchecker, Search Status and some SEO plugins that I use to find out important information about websites. I also use this profile when I change the code or design of one of my websites.

The test profile last but not least is basically only there to test new add-ons, extensions, plugins and Greasemonkey scripts. I usually install them in the test profile first to see how they work with the other installed add-ons and if they show erratic behavior.

The profiles are independently of each other. This does increase security because I do not visit other websites that could attack the browser with the secure profile, this does add speed because I moved all those big SEO and webmaster related add-ons in the SEO profile and this does speed up normal surfing because I only use a few add-ons in that profile.

Adding profiles to Firefox:

Before you start you need to close all instances of Firefox. If you do not do this you cannot start the profile manager. Once that is done you need to open the command prompt by typing Windows R and cmd.

Now navigate to your Firefox profile, the default location is c:\program files\mozilla firefox. This means you enter cd c:\program files\mozilla firefox

Start the profile manager with the command firefox.exe -profilemanager

Only one profile, the default one will be visible. Just add another profile by pressing the create profile button. All you need to do is to add another unique name and the new profile will be created. You can move the location of the profile if you like as well.

Working with Firefox profiles:

Now that we have the profiles we need a way to select the profiles during startup. One way would be to uncheck the box Don’t ask at startup. This would have the consequence that Firefox would always display the profile manager when you startup Firefox giving and you would have to select the profile manually.

I do prefer a slightly different approach. I usually work with the default profile and I therefor decided to keep the box checked and create a shortcut, a second one, that would open the Firefox profile manager whenever I needed to change the profile.

The easiest way to do this is to right-click the desktop and to select Create Shortcut from the menu. Now enter the path “c:\program files\mozilla firefox\firefox.exe” -profilemanager in the box and you are ready to go. Whenever you double-click that icon the Firefox profile manager will start.

An even more advanced parameter would be to add the profile name to the mix which would start that profile. Just add “Profile Name” after -profilemanager to gain that effect. Please note that this parameter is case sensitive.