Using Multiple Profiles

Mozilla enables you to have more than one profile. When Firefox starts, the first thing it does is load profiles.ini (see Figure 4.6). If profiles.ini contains more than one profile, Firefox prompts the user to find which profile to use.

Figure 4.6. Notepad enables you to manually add a profile to the profiles.ini file.

Tip

If you disabled the Choose User Profile dialog box in the Profile Manager, you can enable it by doing the following:

1. First, close all your Mozilla programs (Firefox and Thunderbird, for example).

2. Next, click the Start menu's Run option.

3. In the Run window's Open box, type Firefox -p or Firefox ProfileManager. This forces Firefox to display the Profile Manager.

Now you can switch profiles if you like.

When Firefox prompts for the profile to use, the Choose User Profile window (shown in Figure 4.7) appears, allowing you to

• Select any of the available profiles. You can choose which profile you want to use for this session of Firefox.

• Create a profile, which enables you to create a new profile using the Create Profile Wizard.

• Rename a profile, which enables you to rename the currently selected profile. If no profile is selected, this button does nothing.

• Delete a profile, which enables you to delete a profile you no longer need.

Figure 4.7. When Firefox finds more than one profile, it prompts for which one to use.

In the Choose User Profile window, you also can choose to work offline and to prevent the Choose User Profile dialog box from displaying during future starts of Firefox.

Tip

On your desktop you can create icons to start Firefox with each of your profiles. Simply create a shortcut to Firefox, using the command option p Profile Name. This tells Firefox to start and use the named profile.