How in the Tech

Give Firefox Split Personalities with Multiple Profiles

By Adam Myers ⋅ August 18, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

Though the cost of a new computer has plummeted and a number of us would consider the PC as a commodity, most of us are still left sharing one computer amongst a group. Whether it’s your roommate or family, the communal PC is commonplace. Sharing is acceptable and logical, to the point that every major OS facilitates separate user accounts and profiles. This can be a heavy handed approach though if all you want to do is sit down and user the Internet – generally the most popular activity on home computers. The Firefox Profile manager can manage multiple user personalities – each with their own extensions, bookmarks, and preferences – which is often all the per user personalization of a PC that is necessary. In my case, I like to use multiple profiles to test out new Firefox extensions, or around particular work-flows – such as blogging, work, or personal.

Here’s how you can do the same.

1. Shutdown all running instances of the Firefox browser.
2. Launch a Command Prompt via Windows Key + R and typing cmd.
3. From the Command Prompt, navigate to your Firefox installation folder, typically c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\, with cd “c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox”.



4. Start the Firefox Profile Manager with firefox.exe -profilemanager.
5. Create a new profile by clicking, you guessed it, Create Profile.



6. Lastly, you probably want to uncheck the box Don’t ask at startup. With that option disabled, Firefox will prompt for the desired profile on it’s first launch. While I prefer the previous behavior, you may also create a shortcut for firefox.exe -profilemanager and execute that whenever you wish to switch from the default profile.