Firefox Profiles
For a long time now I have known that Firefox has user profiles, but I never really thought about how they might be useful until today. I was reading an article from Google Operating System and it had some neat ideas for why would want to use profiles. After reading that I thought I would post what I had learned from creating my own profiles and why I have them.
To start, from the command line or run command enter:
/path/to/firefox/firefox -ProfileManager
That will bring up this screen:
From that screen you can create or modify your existing profiles. As you can see I created two other profiles other than my default. The first one is my presentation profile, as the name implies, I use it when I am doing presentations. It has no plugins, no bookmarks, and the homepage is set to about:blank. It also does not remember browsing history, saved form information, cookies, etc... so each time I start it up I get a clean slate to work with.
I also created a minimal profile if I need to run Firefox with only a few extensions installed. This can be very handy when you need to do a specific task and the other plugins are eating up too much memory or they just get in the way. This could also be used for programming by creating a development profile that has only the plugins I need for development such as the awesome Web Developer Toolbar.
The next thing to do after you created your profiles is make an easy way to get to them. For this, you have a couple options. First, you could uncheck the don't ask at startup option in the profile manager. I find that really annoying though since I really only want to run these other profiles in certain cases, so here is another way you can do it.
From the command line or run menu enter:
/path/to/firefox/firefox -P "Profile Name"
This will start Firefox in the profile you selected but remember that it is Case Sensitive.
Now you can start Firefox in a new profile easily from the run command or you could even make shortcuts for each profile.
Comments
In my house we have a common pc that is our media player in the living room - I've been meaning to sort out profile management on it so that we can each have our own profiles in firefox when we start it up. Saves on confusion of history, extensions, passwords, etc!
Nice post.