How to make multiple profiles in Firefox

Posted on August 28, 2008 at 5:39 am

Shared OS accounts are common in a family PC. With many users sharing the same account it is easy to be daunted by other user’s browser setting. Firefox, with its full capability to support add ons and extensions, could easily get cluttered but disabling and uninstalling them is sometimes not an option. Also, if you want to want to have your own bookmarks and toolbars untouched it is important for you to have your own Firefox profiles.

First you will need to close all of your running Firefox browsers. You might want to copy this tutorial into MS Word or any document editor of your choice so you could see the steps after you close the browser:

At your Run prompt, type in firefox.exe –ProfileManager click OK to run this command:

You should see the profile editor screen like the one below:

Click on Create Profile to start creating a new profile, you will see the Create Profile Wizard:

After clicking Next, you will need to enter the name of this new profile:

Clicking Finish will create the new profile. you should see it appear on the list of profiles:

When you click Start Firefox, you should see a fresh Firefox screen with no bookmarks or add-ons added to it:

Since this is a new profile, you will still need to set the appropriate proxy settings if needed. It will not inherit from your default profile. The passwords saved from your other profile will not be shared too. This is a good way to keep things neat if you are sharing a single Windows account.

For Linux and Mac OS users, you can check out the official Firefox document here: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+profiles