I-Firefox Community Forum

I made the mistake to following Mozilla's advice on why my tabs stopped coming back after I closed out, despite the fact that I had that selected in my settings. Now I'm stuck with an "Old Firefox Data" folder on my desktop and I can't remove it because I need administrator privileges -- but it's my personal PC. WTF

How can I transfer my bookmarks to the new version of Firefox. The bookmarks are still available from the drop-down top bar "bookmarks" but they don't show on the Firefox page. I don't know how to get to the "about:profiles" page to change back to the profile that shows my bookmarks toolbar.

Since the new "feature" profiles came out, I now always have this "originalprofile" in the browser (in the title bar) and in the Windows taskbar... It's really annoying.... Now my question is, how do I get rid of it again... on 3 more pictures, Firefox language is German...

I have a bunch of profiles set up via "about:profiles". Some of these are associated with different Mozilla accounts, some are not. Today, I wanted to rearrange those profiles to put some older profiles that I do not use as often lower on the page than more recent profiles. I thought I remembered there being an overview text file that included a number for each profile, the folder that profile's information was stored in, etc. When I went looking for that file, I could not find it, so I went looking for help articles and discovered that there is a new profile management tool.

When I tried using the new profile manager via "about:profilemanager", none of my current profiles are visible, so I cannot use that tool to reorder my profiles.

I would be grateful if you could point me to an article explaining how to reorder the profiles in "about:profiles". If that is not possible, I would appreciate a help article explaining the rationale for making these two uses of the word "profile" distinct, the ways in which these profiles are different from each other, and how to transfer settings from the older version to the newer version. I have everything set up just the way I like it within my current profiles and really do not want to have to recreate them from scratch...

Hi - Firefox placed an 'Old Firefox data' folder on my desktop and I am unable to delete it. I'ver tried third party apps, logging in as administrator, command line delete, uninstalling FF but am still stuck with it and my network settings are wrecked so I can't re-establish connection to the internet on that machine. Anyone with any suggestions as to how I get rid of the 'Old Firtefox data' folder ? Many thanks...

Hi,

I take a look to forums and docs but didn't find answer to it : just found informations about the use of firefox -P

Is there a way to change the defaults profile path.

For example, in the profiles.ini :

Name=default IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/be7er9lz.default Default=1

this is a relative path referring to %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\[PathVariableValue]

Is there a way to change a config file or config to customise the path for all users a windows computer ?

For example :

setting this variable to \\nameofserver\Firefox\

will made all relatives profiles looking for : \\nameofserver\Firefox\[PathVariableValue]

without this option, I should be obliged to edit all users profiles.ini to change path to absolute

Thanks for your help

ludovic

I have Firefox installed on both my desktop and my laptop. On my laptop, I am able to create and manage profiles; however, on my desktop, there is no option available in the menu (the hamburger menu) to do so.

I have verified that both devices are running the latest version of Firefox, which includes the profile management feature, but I am still unable to access it on my desktop.

When i upgraded Firefox my old profile doesn't show up now. I found my old profile under about:profiles but when i click on the Launch profile in new browser i get this message, "You've launched an older version of Firefox. Using an older version of Firefox can corrupt bookmarks and browsing history already saved to an existing Firefox profile. To protect your information, create a new profile for this installation of Firefox" I did create a new profile but how do i get my old saved data, add ons etc to the new profile?

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 recently reinstalled Debian 13 on my workstation. This included installing Firefox-esr from the Debian repositories so the version before and after the reinstall is the same. Despite this, Firefox refused to start until I created a new profile - insisting that my profile was from an older version.

To add insult to injury, it offers a method to import data from Chromium (which I use rarely) but not from a previous Firefox profile.

Firefox Sync works so far as it goes, but not everyone wants to use it. Importing from a local profile should be easier to implement than remotely syncing - especially given that Firefox clients may not be the same on different devices.

And, of course, the initial point is that Firefox should accept a user profile when it was created by the same version. After all, when I upgrade Firefox on Debian, I'm not required to create a new profile. Why should I be forced to do it when I reinstall the same version?

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?

I have an account with Chewy. When I try to access the link to "My Pet" I receive this message:

400 Bad request Your browser sent an invalid request.

I don't understand why or how to correct it.

I opened up Firefox just now to find that my two profiles currently in use are completely inaccessible. I was faced with a "Create Profile" dialogue that launched me into a brand new profile with none of my settings, keybinds, cookies, extensions, anything. Despite this, I know for a fact that my old profiles are *still* there. As you can see my profile folders are right there, with all their data intact as far as I can tell from inspecting their contents, yet they are not accessible from the about:profiles.

Please help me. What is happening with the profile manager? How do I access those old profiles?

With the new update came profiles, which is pretty useless for me. However, it bugs me that the firefox icon on the taskbar now has the profiles' star on it. Is there a way to remove this?

The article explaining why one should not downgrade ignores a critical reason why one needs to downgrade and that is when it turns out that the new version breaks an existing website!

I got bitten by this when Firefox "upgraded" me to V143 after which point the ticket system I use to support my customers stopped working. That same ticket system continues to work fine in Safari, Edge, Chrome and Brave, etc.

Worse, when one does try to downgrade, the old profile gets removed which means you lose EVERYTHING you had (tabs, bookmarks and presumably all the settings and saved passwords, etc). You need to be keeping the old profiles around so that they can be accessed again should someone NEED to downgrade. Fortunately I was able to use Time Machine to recover the old profile --- but somebody just didn't think this through.

Much as I have loved Firefox over the years, I'm starting to feel that it's time to give up on it and move to something else.

Turning off automatic updates is not a solution because eventually one will choose to upgrade manually and most people won't remember to make a copy of their existing profile. Should one then encounter a problem, you're back to square one

Very disappointing .

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 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?

For highly encrypted messages and sensitive information each time renewed or discovered for the first time cam be very intimidating for certain people. Based on the facts and past experiences, this has become extremely important to discuss and share knowledge with true and trustworthy people only to ours and others peace of mind and safety.