Using Multiple Firefox Profiles Concurrently For Your Toolbars And Webmails
The toolbar add-ons for social networking and search engine sites are great tools for your Firefox browser. However, these toolbars may quickly mess up with stuff which you don’t really need. It may also be frustratingly slow down your browser if you have many toolbars installed and it occupies your browser window by reducing the view area. Although Firefox has the functionality to disable these toolbars temporary, it is usually troublesome to go through the disable menu : Tools > Add-ons > Disable.
Another problem that you may face is that you cannot open more than one webmail account simultaneously in your Firefox. To switch between them, an account must be log-out before you can log-in to another one. This can be annoying in situations when you need to open several accounts concurrently. Opening two windows in Firefox doesn’t work, simply because both windows are using the same browser instance and cookie.
So, it is useful to have multiple profiles for different purpose and you can decide which one to start as and when required. Each of your profile will run independently in difference instance. This is extremely useful for example when you want to have a profile for your social networking, run multiple profiles for your different Gmail accounts, or a profile just for your web development. There are some other ways to solve the problems, for example: How to open multiple Google user accounts on one computer, 5 Ways To Log Into Several Gmail Accounts At The Same Time.
To have multiple profiles for your browser is simple, it requires no advance technical knowledge. All you need to know is the way to set it up.
Create New Profile
The first step is to create a new Firefox profile (I’m using Window XP). Make a copy of the Firefox desktop shortcut (copy & paste). Rename it to “Firefox Profile Manager”.
Right click the new shortcut & select Property, go to Shortcut tab and append to the end of the “Target” box with -p and click OK.
Double click this new shortcut to open up the Choose User Profile dialog and click “New Profile” to create a new profile, name it as “Profile1″ (or name it as you like). Leave the “Don’t ask at startup” checkbox unchecked. Follow the steps and click “Finish” to complete the setup.
Run the New Profile
You are now having a new profile created, how to access it? Make another copy of FireFox desktop shortcut again, this time rename it to “Profile1″. Go to the Property of the new shortcut, under the Shortcut tab, append -p Profile1 -no-remote to the end of the “Target” box, and click OK.
The -no-remote option is to tell Firefox start the profile in a completely new instance.
Now, you have three shortcuts on your desktop, one is your original shortcut (probably you don’t need this anymore, or simply make it as your default profile by appending -P default -no-remote to the Target box), “FireFox Profile Manager” a profile for you to access the profile manager, and the new “Profile1″.
Repeat the process, create as many different profiles as you like, probably one for your social networking sites, and some others for your webmail accounts.
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Firefox Blog
[25 April 2009 at 10:31 PM]
ICT Trends says:
Never cared that we can create and switch profiles. Good thing to learn today.
The tutorial is fairly easy to follow, well text and illustration. Thank you very much for informative article.
I’m impressed and started to follow this site as sarahFairy!
McLaughlin says:
very useful, my partner wants to do exactly this and right now has FF, Opera, Chrome and IE running, just to have her different emails open.
Side note, if you update to the latest tweetmeme you can have it re-tweet you instead of rt tweetmeme. Give you credit for what you post.
Philip Ze says:
@McLaughlin : thanks for the tweetmeme update, my retweet button has now been updated with @philipze.
ChrisM says:
Thanks for the post, (and to Mr M above me :) for the heads up on it). I have a problem where my YouTube account was banned (half a dozen 10 second clips of sci-fi/comedy, not exactly TiVo!), and as it is was tied into my GMail account, whenever I’m checking webmail, I need to delete cookies before YouTube will let me sign into my newly created account - other wise a ‘you’re banned’ msg appears, before I even try and enter any details. Assuming a fresh set of cookies are used for new profiles, this should work perfectly.
Oh, btw, you might want to mention that you need all instances of FireFox to be shut before the -p argument does anything - at least that is how it worked on my PC.