Forum communautaire Firefox

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)

Running Windows 11. Recently there is a small gear symbol on the Firefox icon in the Taskbar. I don't want it there and it's irritating as hell. Apparently it has something to do with profile. I don't care what it has to do with, I want it to go away. I went to about:config and set browser.profiles.enabled to false, but every time I restart Firefox, it apparently gets set to true again.

There is no reason for Firefox to have forced this visual change on users. How do I make the gear go away permanently? The gear goes or Firefox gets uninstalled and I'll go back to Chrome.

HI there,

Glad you folks have included an update to the 'profiles'. However, I'm having trouble with it. I previously created two profiles using 'about:profiles' function. However, only of them has mapped on to the new profiles feature. When I try to add a profile in the new way to do it, I can only create a new one, I can't transfer a pre-existing.

See attachments. One shows the new profile manager with the 'work' profile. The second shows the 'about:profiles' with both 'work' and 'life'. How to I add 'life' to the new profile manager?

I've used Firefox as my default for years and years. Yesterday I got some popover telling me I had to create a new profile or I'd lose all my Firefox data, history, bookmarks, etc. It would not let me avoid this. So I did. Still lost all my history, started over. Today it's doing the same thing. What's up? I don't want to move to Chrome.