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Why does Mozilla advise against multiple profiles for multiple users?

  • 2 replies
  • 11 have this problem
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  • Last reply by rjohnson19

AnonymousUser
AnonymousUser

I think I want to establish a separate Firefox profile for my kids, my wife , and myself but Mozilla website advises against using multiple profiles unless a developer. I am now on Firefox 3.6.3. I had multiple profiles for a year on previous versions of Firefox and it seemed to accomplish what I wanted. Is there a better way to accomplish this? Any technical reason not to use profiles?

I think I want to establish a separate Firefox profile for my kids, my wife , and myself but Mozilla website advises against using multiple profiles unless a developer. I am now on Firefox 3.6.3. I had multiple profiles for a year on previous versions of Firefox and it seemed to accomplish what I wanted. Is there a better way to accomplish this? Any technical reason not to use profiles?

Chosen solution

You can use the Profile manager to separate browser profiles. It all works fine.

The disclaimer on the Profile Manager - Create, remove or switch Firefox profiles article is probably for a few reasons:

  • The profile manager can be confusing to figure out how to access and use
  • It is primarily used as a troubleshooting step, and the UI for it might be going away or changing in future versions of Firefox.
  • Its easy for less experienced users to do dangerous things like get stuck in a new profile, or accidentally delete the default profile.

But I don't see how using Firefox profiles offers an advantage over Windows user accounts. There is no real password protection, anyone can delete / view / use other profiles, and the UI is poor.

That being said, many people use profiles to manage different versions of Firefox without problems.

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All Replies (2)

rjohnson19
rjohnson19

Chosen Solution

You can use the Profile manager to separate browser profiles. It all works fine.

The disclaimer on the Profile Manager - Create, remove or switch Firefox profiles article is probably for a few reasons:

  • The profile manager can be confusing to figure out how to access and use
  • It is primarily used as a troubleshooting step, and the UI for it might be going away or changing in future versions of Firefox.
  • Its easy for less experienced users to do dangerous things like get stuck in a new profile, or accidentally delete the default profile.

But I don't see how using Firefox profiles offers an advantage over Windows user accounts. There is no real password protection, anyone can delete / view / use other profiles, and the UI is poor.

That being said, many people use profiles to manage different versions of Firefox without problems.

the-edmeister
the-edmeister
  • Moderator

Separate Windows Logon User Accounts will give you separate Firefox Profiles, that is the preferable manner of keeping one user's data for every program separate and private from all the other users on that PC. Just about every OS released in the last decade supports separate LUA's. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/winxp/accounts.mspx