I-Firefox Community Forum

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.

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.

When I do try to create, rename or delete a profile, I get the message, "An unexpected error has prevented your changes from being saved".

I have a new Windows 11 PC. I installed Firefox first from the Windows store and had problems adding a second profile. Now, I've downloaded the full installer and still have the problem after multiple uninstalls, deleting the appdata Firefox folder and re-installing. I've also tried to rename the FF folder after encountering the problem and just restarting FF. It seems to create a new folder with profiles, but I can't create or delete the profiles from the profile manager or from about:profiles.

I've also checked that the folders and profiles.ini are not in read-only. I've also tried to manually create profiles or create profiles using the command prompt. Nothing seems to work.

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

I have created two profiles using the new functionality that is accessed using the "hamburger" or three horizontal lines menu. I want to open one profile at times, but the other at different times. I can only specify a default profile for initial browser start, or to have the browser make me choose each time. Either of these options mean that I have to go through extra steps to launch any profile beside the default. This effectively makes the new profiles less useful to me than the profile manager that has been around for much longer.

Searching for help online has led me to several suggestions to create shortcuts that use the -P "profile name" switch for each profile. This is out of date because the profiles I can access from the command line bear no connection to the ones I have created as described in the above paragraph. They are only the ones I have created using the (old) profile manager from the profile manager in about:settings.

Did I miss something, in other words is it possible to do something similar with the new container profiles as I can with the original config profiles?

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)

I went through the process of importing all of my old profiles into the new profile manager and I, for one, am stoked that we are joining the big leagues with regards to profile management. This has been a feature that I have been waiting for for quite some time now. I have an extension that allows me to easily switch between the old profiles but a proper, built in solution was necessary.

That is until I launched Firefox the next day and was greeted with my work profile instead of my personal profile. I started digging through the settings and it seems that this is the intended default behavior for profiles. The last profile you had open is the profile that will open by default.

It's fine if the developers want that to be the default but what I also find strange is that I cannot, for the life of me, find a way to change this behavior on Windows. I found it on Linux (I think??) but I dont see a flag for it in the usual places. Maybe I missed it. That is why I am here.

1.) Is there a way to change this default behavior for the new profile manager? 2.) If not, can we plan to add that feature? Currently, this behavior makes the new profile system unusable for me because I need my browser to open to my personal profile when I open a new window.

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

Unimportant and mildly disruptive issue: I've been using the about:profiles method to maintain separate profiles. I am aware that this is distinct from the new way to manage profiles (about:profilemanager; https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1543697 ).

I normally use my default profile (let's call it profile A) to open other profiles (of which there are 6 + a Nightly profile).

However, recently I've noticed that if I open another profile (B) from profile A: Refreshing profile A's about:profiles makes it inactive, with the "Another copy of Firefox has made changes to profiles" error. Now, B's about:profiles correctly displays the different profiles, and I can launch more profiles from here. But A is still shown as the default profile. I've tried this with a few other profiles (C, D), but even with those open, B still seems to have the functional about:profiles page.

Is there any way to reset this, i.e. to make A's about:profiles functional even when profile B is launched?

Edit: I think this is because profile B has the new profile manager enabled, and under this, B is the original profile. I tried setting browser.profiles.enabled to false in the about:config settings but this doesn't seem to help. Oh well!

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 wish Firefox would realize that when working on this machine I am at work and my laptop is personal. I now have too many work things registered under my personal email. I am considering no longer using FireFox because the browser can't seem to be cognizant of work vs. personal.

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.