Firefox allows us to create and use multiple Profiles, that are isolated from each other.

When you create a new profile, it's like having a brand new Firefox while keeping your "old" profile still accessible.

I wrote this article to help my Humble Bundle Downloader users 🤩 troubleshoot their issues with my plugin and also my fellow developers coworkers who are more accustomed to Chrome.

Why do we need Firefox Profiles ?

When we use Firefox in our everyday life, our Firefox profile becomes a bit "dirty":

• we install plugins, ad blockers
• visit web sites that install things that runs in background
• have cache here and there

We also have things that we don't want to loose :

• open tabs (use this extension)
• bookmarks
• website permissions
• etc.

For all these reasons, we prefer creating a new Firefox Profile ✨ and want to avoid a Firefox Refresh that are the 2 way of getting a very clean 🧹 Firefox.

How create a new Firefox Profile

2 ways to create and launch Firefox Profile Managers (2 different interfaces)

The easiest way

We could call this Profile Manager the full page interface :

1. enter in your Firefox address bar (the one where you type www.google.com): about:profiles
2. click on the button Create a New Profile
3. in the popup, click Next, then enter a Name like my-debugger
4. click Finish
5. you come back on the first page where you'll find this new Profile (my-debugger) and just have to click Launch profile in new browser

For the techies

This Profile Manager is a small pop-up. Just launch a terminal and type firefox -P (with a capital P not p) and click on the Create Profile... button

MDN articles

Detailed Mozilla post about Profile Manager (and in Français)

Launch and use a profile

Now that you have your profiles (you can have as many as you like) you can use either of these Firefox Profile Managers to launch the Profile you need. Remember, each profile is like a totally independent Firefox.

Default Profile

Finally in the Profile Manager, you can define a default profile, that will be launched when you'll launch Firefox from its icon (the standard way 😅).