How I Use Things

If you’re at all like me, trying to throw all of your needs into the hands of one little browser is really just asking too much of it. That’s why at the time of this writing I have five (5!) separate Firefox profiles set up and in use.

It’s true.  See?

Allow me to explain. First, I am a heavy user of Firefox extensions, so at one point I realized I was harming my browser experience in all tasks by piling on so many of them. Second, as I do a lot of web development work I require separate environments (development, production, etc.) to be available concurrently with no overlap or conflict.

So the default profile is my everyday, usually open, random and habitual stuff profile. It’s loaded with extensions like one that gives me an easy way to allow cookies for a site (by default, I don’t), another for Delicious Bookmarks, another for blocking ads, and so on.

It has a companion profile, called “Private”.  This one is set to always use Tor (via FoxyProxy) and never hold on to cookies or history of any kind. That profile is for overthrowing corrupt regimes. Or something. Moving on…

You can’t miss that I have three “development” profiles. These are loaded with a thousand (approx.) extensions for web development, from Firebug to MeasureIt. There’s one each for the development and production environments at work, and one for everything else.

All of the profiles share collection of extensions for modifying the Firefox UI in ways important to me.  I’ll detail one in a little bit and leave the rest for another time.

There’s a great write-up on how to create multiple profiles on Lifehacker, one of my favorite places on the web. I did find some differences in that article versus what worked for me, so let me give a quick run-down. This is from an assumed fresh install of Firefox, so modify as needed (use your brain).

First I installed all of the extensions common to the profiles into my default. After that was all done I cleared history and so forth, modified settings as needed, and exited Firefox.

Then I navigated to the directory of Firefox profiles and set about copying my base profile to a few new names. In my case that was “Private” and “development – home”.

Because a link isn’t installed for accessing the profile manager by default, I punched in the following at the command line:

If you just get a new browser window, you didn’t close out of Firefox first.  Do so and try again. Once you’re looking at the profile manager, go ahead and add a new profile.  Select one of your new profile directories and give the profile a corresponding name.

At this point what you do depends on your goals.  For me, I had two sets of similar profiles to create.  So I created just two cloned directories and added them to the profile manager, “Private” and “development – home”.  I load my developer profiles heavily with extensions, so I didn’t clone that profile to the two work-related profiles until after I’d added Firebug and half a dozen or more other extensions to it.

From there of course I wanted an easy way to load each of them, and that meant adding them to the Gnome menu. By chance, my Google search for a tutorial to provide turned up one specifically about Firefox.

In the end, that’s what my set of development profiles looks like.

One last thing. If you’ve got a few of these profiles loaded at once, it may become difficult to tell which is which. By installing the Nightly Tester Tools extension, you can set your titlebar to display which profile is loaded.  (Previously I used Titlebar Tweaks, but there isn’t a 3.x-compatible version.)

Best thing? You can load them by keyboard with Gnome Do.

Don’t worry, Windows users, you have an awesome, all-keyboard graphical tool to do this sort of thing too!

Trevor Bramble firefox firefox, profiles