I have a laptop which I use to connect to the internet both at work and at home. It’s a really hassle for me to change the connection settings in Firefox to use our office proxy server when I’m at work, and then remove it when I get back home.
Luckily, Firefox gives me the ability to manage multiple profiles where I can customize the connection settings, bookmarks, browser toolbars, extensions, etc, for each profile.
To start up the Firefox profile manager type the following at the command prompt
C:\>"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" --profilemanager
This will bring up the profile manager where you can create, delete, or rename a profile. I created a “Work” profile. If you uncheck the “Don’t ask at startup” check, Firefox will ask you each time it starts which profile it should use. If you don’t want to be asked the question each time, then it’s possible to create Firefox shortcuts which open Firefox using the profile specific with the -P parameter. For example, I created a shortcut that opens my “Work” profile with following: "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P Work
Running Multiple Profiles at Once
By default Firefox doesn’t let you run two different profiles at once. An example of why you might want to run two profiles as once is when you are at work browsing an internal website but you also want to do some internet surfing through an SSH tunnel at the same time.
This can be done by adding the -no-remote parameter to the Firefox shortcut.
e.g. "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P Work -no-remote
The image below I’m running the the “default” Firefox which has nothing, and my “Work” profile with the toolbars and extension installed to help me develop.
