If you want to filter tap water – attach filter to the tap, not to the kettle, coffee machine and every other device in the house related to water. So, if you want to add the encryption – attach it to the disk, not to browser, mail client, instant messenger and every other software you want encryption in.

It would be really simpler ;)

Firefox profile manager allows to chose any folder for profile, and on encrypted disk all your data will be encrypted.

With FEBE I created new profile with same (then reduced) extension set in five minutes.

No, I don’t know a way to make addons common across profiles. In the early days before Extension Manager became part of FF, it was possible to install Extensions globally. Extensions installed that way got put in the Firefox program directory instead of the profile directory, and existed for all users.

That doesn’t seem to exist for FF3, so you’ll need to install the desired one in each. Since a different set of add-ons is one of the reasons to have more than one profile, I’ll call this desirable.
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Dennis

firefox.exe -P guest -no-remote

This will launch Firefox with the guest profile even if other profiles are currently running. Of course, differentiating between each may be tricky which is where an extension like Titlebar Tweaks may come in handy.

My big issue was having multiple Mozilla based browsers with multiple profiles, but wanting them all to use the *same* bookmarks file. In older versions this was easy: I could create a user.js file in the profile directory with a pointer to the desired file. The browser would read the user.js file, what was in it would override the defaults, and the browser would use the desired file. I just copied the user.js file into any new profile I created, and off I went.

Unfortunately, FF3 breaks that. Bookmarks are in the places.sqlite file, and there is no way within Firefox to specify the location. The Mozilla developers have cited this as a WONTFIX. Under WinXP2 I have a workaround: NTFS5 supports hard links, so I create a link to the desired file in each profile directory. There is also a preference to force FF3 to automatically export to a bookmarks.html file on closing, and the location will be the one pointed to by the user.js file, so if I open an instance of FF2 or older browser based on Mozilla code, they see the latest and greatest. The drawbacks are that hard links can’t span file systems, so I can’t put the places.sqlite file on a different drive or network share, and changes I make to bookmarks in an older browser don’t get propagated back to FF3. I can live with both limitations, but I wish the Mozilla devs would reconsider the inability to specify the bookmark location.

There is an extension available that performs that task. At least with two profiles, it’s worked well for me, and it seems to work fine – at least so far – with Firefox 3, as well:

Paolo “Kaosmos”’s ProfileSwitcher add-on for Firefox:

https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/profileswitcher-en.html

Thanks,

1a. (if desired) navigate explorer the the Program Files\ Firefox or Application Data\(user)\Mozilla\Firefox folders, etc. as desired.

1b. Windows Key + R;
2. Type in “Firefox -p” (without the quotes)

Need to say, plugins remain common to all FF profiles…

I have a one and only profile, but now that I read you, Martin, I do consider creating a second profile, should it be only for testing new extensions. Up to now, I would backup FF data in Application Data folder, and restore that data in case of removal of a “heavy” extension. A second profile would make it easier, smarter.