Firefox Community Forum

I switched to Firefox a few months ago and I've been using the "about:profiles" page to mimic chrome's profile feature. I have 3 profiles, each with their own Mozilla account. How can I migrate these to the new profiles system?

This afternoon, I clicked on a link from an email and for the first time got a choose a profile pop-up. I do not want this; I have read info on Mozilla and elsewhere about its purpose but it doesn't say how to just stop the pop-up - there should be an option just stop the pop-up because I don;t want to have to choose amongst options. I have started copy-pasting the links in emails and going to Chrome and will seriously have to reconsider using Firefox of this continues. I don't want to have to type about:config or anything - this should have been an opt out or opt in thing and I want out. Thank you for your help.

I have used Firefox for years, both out of conviction and to help protect my privacy, even though I often put up with images and forms not displaying on web pages.

Then, three times in two months, after restarting Firefox, I found all my tabs, bookmarks and browser history had disappeared. The only thing I did between restarts was to run Wise Care 365 to clear some space on my laptop, something I had done hundreds of times before.

The first time the loss occurred I found I had a new profile, a feature I neither wanted nor was consulted about. At least I was able to get back to my original profile. The next two times this proved impossible.

Firefox "support" was of no use. Multiple searches produced nothing which helped. After agonising hours, I was able to retrieve my bookmarks and my Firefox browser history through Microsoft Edge. But as a writer and (award-winning) journalist I cannot afford to risk losing my research and links.

So although I disapprove of some Microsoft business practices. I am moving to Edge. If I have missed something that makes sense of this, I would be pleased to hear it. In the meantime, Mozilla needs to improve its product and customer service.

Wishing its customers well,

Francis Shennan

Hello,

I have a personal profile and a work profile on Firefox.

Both profiles have a short cut on the desktop to their webmails. At present when I double click either of the shortcuts, Firefox starts and presents the Windows to select the profile to use.

Is there some way to specify in each shortcut which profile it should use to open the webmail?

Thanks Neeraj

For roughly three months I have been experiencing issues with Twitch.tv that I do not have on other browsers. Namely, after a random period of time the site will just "go out" on me. I can keep watching streams that are open, but any attempt to open a new window or tab results in a page with no elements loaded. During this "out" period none of my chats will send, and any other attempts to interact with Twitch will fail. After a random period of time, things will go back to normal.

I've tried clearing my cache and cookies, I've tried disabling and uninstalling all of my extensions, I've tried updating the browser, I've uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox, I've tried Incognito Mode, I've tried a DNS flush, I've refreshed Firefox and it didn't work.

I have found one thing that has worked though. I created two new profiles. The first had the issues occur again, but the second one hasn't experienced any of the same issues as far as I've seen, so I think the issue is with my settings. The trouble is, I don't know which setting is the issue, and deleting prefs.js doesn't appear to reset my settings, even after restarting my browser. Is there some step I'm missing regarding deleting prefs.js?

Please do NOT suggest using Firefox Refresh, as I am NOT interested in going through all the steps again, especially when it didn't work at all the first time I tried.

I was positively surprised recently when the new Firefox profile manager (about:profilemanager) was introduced. https://www.tech2geek.net/how-to-use-the-new-updated-profile-manager-in-firefox-2025/ is an article about that.

However, I thought it's just a new visual UI with an in-browser switcher for the existing profiles (that I already had setup). However, it does not appear so.

The differences I see:

1. 1. 1. old profile management

• was managed by `about:profiles` or when starting FIrefox with `-P`
• is saved in `~/firefox` and the `profiles.ini` clearly and quite obviously mentions them there, so it's easy to manage them.

I also found this old support article: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles

1. 1. 1. new profile management

• automatically asks on startup if more than one profile exists
• is managed by `about:profilemanager` or with the Firefox burger menu
• seems to be saved in `~/.mozilla/firefox/Profile Groups` (Linux path here) in some .sqlite files, and I do not quite understand the format. Not mentioned in `profiles.ini`.
• also, when you change something here (even like opening a profile?), you cannot open `about:profiles` anymore, because it says "Some Firefox process has made changes to your profile, […] you need to restart Firefox", only after a restart further changes would be possible, which I find quite confusing but it also indicates somehow the features belong together?

And this seems to be the new one: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management#w_whats-the-difference-between-profiles-and-multi-account-containers

1. 1. Questions

• What are the differences here (I may have missed)?
• How can the new profile feature save so few files? Is it technically called "profile groups"?
• And the most important: How can I migrate an old profile? (In order to use the new features and GUI etc. I quite like)

Yes, I'd like to use the same account on both of my profiles.

I understand that for some users, this may be confusing.

In my case, the only reason for different profiles is that I need to use a Proxy Server for some websites, and no proxy for other websites. Manually switching proxy settings is painful, and doing so causes traffic for my other tabs/windows to go to the proxy, which I do not want.

I have a main (set of) windows (and its tabs) going straight to the internet, then I have a separate window (and its tabs) configured to go through a proxy (SOCKS5 in this case). I want all other settings, bookmarks, passwords, etc. to be identical to both. I end up having to logout of my main profile, log into the other profile to sync settings, log out of there, and log back into my main profile.

Is there a valid technical reason why an account on the same FireFox installation cannot be shared between two profiles?

I can do this on multiple computers (same account, different computers/profile), seems odd it is restricted to not allow on the same computer.

I have an alternative solution: Install FireFox natively, then install FireFox as AUR or FlatPak, but not sure this will collide as this both uses the same profile directory. Hum...

Wayne

I recently downloaded Firefox and made two profiles on it from the hamburger button in the top right. I make one called "Work Profile" and another called "Personal Profile". I was trying to pin each one to the task bar separately because I would use youtube to watch videos/listen to music on one window and do my work in another. I have enabled the group profiles on taskbar so they dont show up together under the same icon and added { -no-remote -P "Profile Name"} to each shortcut in its properties>target on windows explorer.

It just keeps bringing up the choose user profile window but it doesn't even have the two profiles listed that I want.

When I open default then all my profiles are gone in the top right profiles window but if I choose default-release my profiles are there to select again. I am pretty sure firefox just has two things it calls profiles, one is for multiple installs and the other in in each install and I don't know how to fix it now as all my settings/passwords/add-ons are setup and I would like to not have to do it again.

Is there an application to get rid of 'Old Firefox Data' folder? I tried to remove it once on another machine and i lost all internet connection (needed a full Windows restore) so very nervous about this.

I am currently using FF v133.0 and I want to downgrade to v130.0. I tried this once before and could not get the 'Profile' to activate and reinstall all of my settings, bookmarks, add-ons, etc.

Please provide step-by-step instructions for doing this. Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

I am using Windows 10 64 bit.

Thank you.

I'm running Firefox 122.0.1 on a Windows 10 desktop PC, with a profile which includes a userChrome.css file which makes several layout and cosmetic changes.

I also have a laptop (also Windows 10) which has an old Firefox 97.0.1 installation, and I'd like to make the same changes on this machine which I'm used to on the main computer. I copied my desktop profile to the laptop, to the same directory as its present profile, but when I rebooted Firefox the transferred profile wasn't recognised.

While doing the transfer I received error messages about some of the folders: Destination path too long. This despite the fact that the registry flag to accept extended paths is set to 1. I had to skip several folders in order to complete the transfer.

Could this be the reason why the new profile isn't being picked up? Or is it because the two Firefoxes are of different versions?

I'd be grateful for any thoughts. Many thanks.

Can you add a configuration setting to Mozilla Firefox to disable Create New Profile, configurable in the policies.json file? (A second option but a much uglier one would be to disable being able to select a file location for a new profile. Then you could make the default profile directory write only, which would also accomplish the same thing.) (A third option would be to able to configure extensions by default upon installation in the ExtensionSettings policy.)

To explain, I use LeechblockNG on Firefox on Ubuntu. Very helpful. By placing a policies.json file (see at bottom) in /etc/firefox/policies/ directory, I can create a system wide policy. I can make the LeechblockNG extension mandatory and to be installed upon every new profile creation. That all works very well. HOWEVER, there is NO way to be able to set those options in the new profile. So LeechblockNG is installed with default options (which are no blocking at all), which effectively bypasses the addon.

I am also writing the author of the leechblock extension to see if there is any way to set the options for leechblock upon installation (the third option above).

But I know other people have this same question, and at present, if I am correct, there is no way to block new profile creation, or the Profile Manager window in Firefox.

So could you please add that option to the Firefox policies.json configuration? Something like "DisableNewProfiles": true would do it.

Thanks!

My current policies.json file in /etc/firefox/policies/ directory: { "policies": { "BlockAboutConfig": true, "BlockAboutProfiles": true, "PrivateBrowsingModeAvailability": 1, "DisableSafeMode": true, "ExtensionSettings":{ "*": { "installation_mode": "blocked", "blocked_install_message": "Prohibited install more extensions." }, "leechblockng@proginosko.com": { "installation_mode": "force_installed", "install_url": "https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/file/4374316/leechblock_ng-1.6.6.xpi" } } } }