Setting up Multiple Profiles in Firefox

Introduction

If you have multiple people using Firefox on the same machine, such as family members or roomates, each user will likely want to have their own bookmarks, preferences, extensions, etc... To allow this, Firefox allows you to create different "profiles" for each user.

Creating additional profiles

By default, a profile named "default" already exists in Firefox and is the one that is used automatically when Firefox starts up. In order to add additional profiles, first quit out of firefox entirely. Then restart firefox with the flag "-profilemanager". This will present a dialog box prompting you to choose or create a profile.

Start Menu -> Run: firefox -profilemanager

Starting Firefox using a specific profile

Now that you have multiple profiles for Firefox, you may have noticed that Firefox will show you the dialog box everytime you start the program. If this becomes annoying, you can create a user specific shortcut to automatically choose a profile when Firefox launches. The

firefox -P "<profilename>"

Multiple Simultaneous Profiles in Firefox

Let's say you are surfing the Internet and your roomate wants to quickly use the Internet using his profile. The problem is you already have Firefox running and you don't want to quit out of it and lose all your open websites.

@echo off
set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
start "Firefox" "C:\Internet\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P "Jesse"

-- JesseSuen - 26 Jul 2006