Profiles MOVED and BROKEN???
I have been a happy Firefox user for decades but I am about to junk it. Why? I keep my profiles on a separate external drive. That way I can just go from my laptop to my desktop and leave off where I was. I also don't take up GGGBytes on my default hard drive. However, Firefox knows better. Use "Profiles - Manage Profiles" or restore a profile from a backup, and all of my precious profile is lost and put in a random folder on my hard drive, exactly what I DO NOT WANT. Then there is the "Can’t delete a profile that is linked to other profiles" nonsense ... Please let ME decide how to run my profiles. I don't want to dig into Firefox code, I don't want to become the world's expert on how and where it keeps my passwords. I just want it to work.
All Replies (3)
How did you configure the path to that external folder, separate from the default profile location?
When I created the new profile from the initial Firefox startup, or from about:profiles, I made sure to select "Choose folder" and then carefully navigated to the folder on the external drive. The problem happened when I wanted to "clean" the profile because it wasn't syncing properly (which I need mainly so that I can also get passwords etc on my Android phone). This is Macos Tahoe 26.5.2 BTW. From past experience, using "refresh Firefox" loses my groups (I use Simple Tab Groups extensively). Maybe I did something wrong but that has been my experience. So I thought maybe making a new, clean profile would work. I tried to backup the existing profile, make a new clean one, and then restore from the backup. But then not only did this not restore my groups, but also it had somehow changed the location of the existing profile to a default place under ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles. However, then I could delete neither old nor new profiles because it said "Can't delete a profile that is linked to other profiles". In the end, I manually edited ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/profiles.ini to retain only the old, possibly problematic profile. I'm not sure that I recommend this but I am quite used to this sort of thing and if the worst comes to the worst of course I have backups. Also, as others have suggested, this is quite a simple way to re-use an existing profile for which the files exist (eg., from another computer, on an external disk) but Firefox doesn't know about it. Again maybe not the recommended way but it has worked for me. Now, not only is the old profile syncing perfectly but I have it as a want it. But there is now an odd addition to the icon on the Macos dock. It looks like a tiny closed book symbol. I don't know whether there is anything to worry about.
philip32 trɔe
PS: I said "sync is working perfectly" but although it seems to work, it isn't saving sync logs, as seen with about:sync-logs.
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