Episode: 327
Title: HPR0327: Mozilla Profiles
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0327/hpr0327.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 16:27:39

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Hi, my name is Gordon Sungler, I am on the IRC channels as this whole web. Now in this
Hacker Public Radio episode I'm going to talk about profiles in Mozilla Firefox and
Mozilla Thunderbird. Now the way you use them are both the same for both programs, so I'm
not going to, I'm not going to duplicate knowledge, I'm just going to explain profiles, I'm going
to use Firefox as my example, but the same thing applies to Thunderbird. So first off, so that we're
all on the same page, I'll go through a few things, what is a profile? Why should I use a profile
and how do I create a profile? Now first of all, what a profile is for users of Linux and Unix,
they're used to having to log on to their computer when it boots up, enter user name in a
password and each user's got its own user name in password. Well, sometimes you don't do that,
and Microsoft certainly don't believe in that level of security, they'd rather just boot
you straight into the, enter the desktop without, without requiring that, obviously businesses
set up against that. But when that happens, when everyone who uses that computer uses the same
uses Firefox or uses Thunderbird as a stable, will stick to Firefox for now, it means that every user's
bookmarks, every user's settings for their extensions and their history and their email,
if they use webmail and stuff like that, their cookies, they're all mixed in together.
Now that can get really messy, I mean it's not too bad if you've got, if you're in a work situation
where everyone's supposed to be using the PC for work-related stuff, so they're all going to be
using the same websites anyway, the same distributors or other partner websites or whatever.
But it can get messy, it can basically get messy, so you can get around that, if you don't have
a separate account on the PC, you can certainly get around that and have separation at the very least
on your Firefox and your Thunderbird by using profiles. Now profiles, as I say, there's lots of
different uses for why you should use a profile. I mean I'm just going to give you a few examples,
it's basically using imagination and I'm sure you can come up with many more. In a work situation,
if you've got an employer who allows you to surf the web within reason during your lunch break,
then what you could have is a business profile, which is all your regular stuff that you need to do,
all your partner stuff, all your professional stuff, and then a lunchtime profile as well,
so that you can close down your business one, open up your lunchtime one, and have all your
bookmarks for YouTube, and dig, and slash dot, and whatever you want, and they won't interfere
with your work one, because it'll be totally separate, it's like two separate profiles.
In a home situation, if the whole family are using the same Firefox profile,
let mom, dad, son, your daughter, again, that can get messy as well, because if you don't use your
profile, or if you're all using the same profile, and you bookmark something, and for whatever reason,
you don't get to use the computer again for a week, and you come back and you find that, well,
that bookmark you just put in has been moved now, it's been deleted, someone's cleaned it up,
you don't know who it is, your son might have done it, you know what, it might have been completely
accidental, you know, your daughter might have been through and stripped a lot of the stuff off,
and she's accidentally stripped something off that was yours when she only meant to do her own,
because the URLs looked kind of similar, or whatever, well if you use separate profiles,
that's not an issue, each person can have their own profile, and you can also with profiles,
you don't have to remember which one to use either, because you can set it up as a shortcut,
which I'll get to, I'll get to in a few minutes how to do that, now the other thing is for flatmates
as well, if you're sharing a flat with several people, and it's sometimes quite handy for privacy,
to have your own profile, I mean you can have a shortcut that says Andy's Firefox or
James Firefox, you know, Sandra's Firefox or whatever it is, and the same with Thunderbolt as well
with email, that keeps at a separation, it keeps privacy, especially as it's very easy to use
like Twitter and Dig and MySpace, Facebook, and all these kind of things, and actually just leave
it ticked as, remember me, so that you don't have to sign back in again, well if everyone's using
the same profile, there's a huge opportunity for abuse there, at least if you separate profiles,
well it helps a bit, basically it helps a bit, the other angle is a security one,
now you sometimes, well Windows users will be well aware that quite often a sign of an infection
of some sort of malware being installed on your system, Windows doesn't bother to actually ask you
whether it wants to install, it just goes ahead and does it anyway, and the only time that you
sometimes, you may not even notice that it's been installed, but sometimes a change can be
something like your homepage changing, now if you're all sharing the same profile, you have no idea,
if you open it up and the homepage has changed, well you don't know if someone else has meant to
change it, and it's their change, you just don't know, so at least if you are the only person
that uses that profile, everyone can have a different homepage, so that's an obvious,
sort of an easy security reason for doing it, then there's other things as well, like
what I use it for is I am teaching myself web design, sometimes I used to call it web development,
but I've recently listened to an interview with Dan from Tulks on on their
on-ex placement, and he quite correctly pointed out that development is very much different from
design, and I am nowhere near a web developer, so web design, I've been rebranded, thanks Dan,
but I do, I'm learning, but I'm doing web design, I'm learning things like Drupal and WordPress,
which involves PHP and CSS and things like that, so I have a profile for that, with tests,
my tests, we're on it, and with extensions for that purpose, the obvious two that sort of
jump out are the web developer toolbar, and Firebug as well, there's a few others, but that's
the main two, now when I'm in work mode, I use that profile, but when I'm just surfing for fun,
you know, when I'm just catching up with the news or checking the football scores, or whatever it
is, I've got another profile, and that's got stuff for extensions for YouTube, and also
various things that I don't need in my other profile, so that's how I use it, but as I say,
there's lots and lots of different ways that you can use profiles, it's ultimately it's up to
it's up to you, it's up to how you use your computer, so after all that, I'm going to assume
that you want to know how to create a profile, because if you don't, I could, that could just
be a quick end to the plot, to this episode, not going to defeat supporters, so if you don't need,
if after all that, if you don't fancy creating a profile or you have no need for it, then you might
as well skip the rest of the episode, but if the idea has a built to you and you want to know,
just well, that's how you do it, first of all, it's handy to know where the profiles are kept,
it's not essential, but it is handy, I mean, I'm going to include in the show notes two links to
the support.mozilla site about profiles, between the two of them, that explains pretty much
what I'm about to explain, but it's there written down as well, that's for Windows users and Mac
users primarily, because I don't know where they're kept, other Windows one is like the usual,
see, call on, backslash, backslash, documents and settings, backslash, application data,
backslash, yada yada yada, whatever, I don't know, I don't care, quite frankly,
if you're using Windows or a Mac, you're going to have to
to check these links to see where your profiles are actually kept.
In Linux, it's a bit simpler than that, it's just home slash, no, your username,
and it's a hidden folder in there, it's a dotmozilla or dotmozilla minus thunderbird,
that's the, that's a two profiles, obviously, Mozilla is Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird is,
speaks for itself, that's thunderbird. Now, if you create, if you just open Firefox,
it'll pick, it'll create a default folder and it'll open. Now, what to get in at the profiles,
this is actually that, I would rather they had an option to deal with this directly, but the moment
they don't, so to get, to look at the profiles, you're going to have to open a terminal and open
up with the command line. And the command for that is Firefox space minus capital P.
Now, what that'll do is open up the, open up Firefox, but it'll, it'll ask you which profile you
want to use, rather than just assuming the default one. This is where you can create a profile,
you can rename it, you can delete it. So, for this, I'm going to create a profile.
So, I'll click on create profile, it'll take you through, it's a little wizard,
a little create profile wizard. Now, as I said, the thunderbird things the exact same,
it's just a thunderbird space minus capital P and you'll go through the exact same thing.
Create profile wizard, first, it's basically just letting you know what you're doing,
hit next, and a new profile name. Now, first of all, before we go any further, if you look
below that, there is your user settings, preferences, and other user-related data will be stored in,
and it gives you the, the URL, it gives you the location. You'll notice it's little gibberish.defaultuser.
Now, I think that's a terrible way to do it personally, but you know, that randomizes it,
but anyway, that's a side point. So, what I'm going to do for this episode, I'm going to create
a profile called HPR. So, again, what I'm going to use capital here, HPR. Now, where do I type that?
If you look in the link below it, it changes dynamically, it's now gibberish.hpr. That's a folder
that's going to be kept in. Well, I don't like that either, you know, call me permickity if you want,
but I don't like that either. So, what I'm going to do is click on the choose folder link.
That will open up in home, username, slash.mozilla, slash Firefox. It's in here, it's
created folder, I'm going to call it HPR again. This time, I'm going to keep the syntax to all
lowercase. You don't need to, you can have it, whatever you want. I just think that inside
these, it's sometimes easier just to keep them as a lowercase. So, once you've created the folder,
and my case, HPR, it's not actually selected yet. So, you have to actually double-click into that
folder that you just created and then open. Now, after you open, obviously, it's going to come back,
it's now changed. It says user settings, preferences, and other user-related data will now be stored in,
you know, and there it is, Firefox slash HPR. That's nice and clean. And that's it. So, now,
if we just finish, you'll now see the HPR profile and the list. Now, what I can do is just click
on start Firefox and it'll take me straight to a brand new cleaning profile called HPR.
I'm not actually going to do that. I'm going to show you how to create that, how to start that
straight from the command line. And the reason for that is that's what you put in your shortcut
to open it directly. So, what I'm going to do is exit from here.
And now, go back, I still have the terminal open. And again, if I use Firefox space,
start again, if I use Firefox space minus capital P, again, I'll come back to the option for
choosing the profile. Well, we don't want that. We want to be able to go straight into that profile
without it prompting, basically. And without it needing to be set as a default.
So, if we use, again, Firefox space minus capital P space, double quotes, HPR, double quotes.
Now, the HPR in this case is the name of the profile, not the folder. Now, in my case, I used
all caps for HPR. So, in here, it has to go in as all caps, even although the folder that it's
actually in as all work is. So, make sure you use the name of the profile here. And hit enter,
and that'll take you straight in. It won't even ask. Well, that's it. Opened up. It's a new brand
squeaky clean profile for Firefox that's opened up. Now, again, you can create as many of the
eases you want. You can set them up to have different sets of extensions on each of them,
different home pages, different bookmarks, different settings for cookies, for ad blocking,
you name it. I mean, you basically use an imagination. So, if we take a step back and look at
where these profiles are. So, if you open up your file manager, in my case, it's through there,
and control H toggles back and forth between displaying or hiding hidden files and folders.
I believe control H is also the shortcut in Nautilus and Conqueror as well,
and Dolphin, I believe, could be wrong. But anyway, show your hidden folders, and you'll see
dot Mozilla and Mozilla Thunderbird. In this case, we've just added a profile to Firefox. So,
we'll go into the fire, the Mozilla one, and then into the Firefox folder. What you'll see here
is the profile, the folder you've created. So, in this case, HPR, and you've also got
profiles.inifile. So, that is an initialization file. If you can right-click and open that,
and I'll play in text editor, and I'll clear a clear text editor. Once that's opened,
it's basically just a name equals, and then the path to it, and then whether it's a default or not.
You can move the default equals one to whichever one you want as your default. So, that's where,
if you find that when you're opening Firefox, and it's going to the wrong profile,
that's where the command and change it. Just copy the default equals one from the wrong profile
to the one you want, and then save it as that, and then restart, and that should fix that.
Now, that's the primary reason for knowing where these are. So, the next thing to mention
is about renaming, and if you've already got, usually at this point, you've already got
a whole mishmash of bookmarks and all that, already in one profile, and you're already starting
to think, oh, that'll be handy to separate that. But if I start doing that, then what happens to
all the stuff that's already there? How do you move that? Well, you can rename the profiles.
I don't really sort of recommend doing that, because all you're doing is renaming the profile,
you're not renaming the path that it goes to. You can certainly open the profiles.in I,
and rename the folder manually and change it to that. But I found that doesn't really work that
well for some add-ons. Some add-ons, when they install themselves, they install to that profile path,
and if that profile path has been changed, they don't know what it's been changed to, and I can't
figure out how to go in and tell it, right, this profile is now called blah, blah, blah, you know,
so I find that sometimes it's annoying that you have to do it this way, but I can understand
why. What I would suggest you do, really, in this case, is create a profile for each use you're
going to split it into, and then export from the old one into the new. So the way I would do that
is if you open up your old profile, essentially, you're one that's congested,
you can, first of all, there's bookmarks, there's a couple of things, you've got basically
you've got bookmarks, so that would be along the top, bookmarks, and then organize bookmarks.
Now, you can at the top option, you've got important backup, so you can import that to, sorry,
you can export your bookmarks on mass, that means everyone's, you know, if it's, if it's like
the family computer, that would be exporting everyone's bookmarks at the same time, so it'd be
like yourselves, your partners, your sons, your daughters, whatever, and it would all be in one
HTML file, so export the bookmarks to a file, it's called my bookmarks or whatever.html,
just leave it as it is if you want, and then the new profile, import those bookmarks back in,
and then strip off everything that's not yours, there will still be there in the main one that
you've been using, but they'll only have yours on your new profile. So it's again, it's the same
thing, it's export on the old profile, and then in the new profile, come back into bookmarks again,
and import, so that's how we do that. Now, the other more complicated one is add-ons,
and some, there are, there is an add-on which lets you back up your extensions and export them
out into one file and then import them back in again. I have not had that much success with that,
good luck if you want to try that, I'll put the, I'll link to, I can't remember what it is off-hand,
I can't remember, oh there it is, F-E-B-E, the Firefox Environment Backup Extension,
you can use that, and it'll basically, the theory is it'll wrap up all your extensions, all
your add-ons into one file, which you can then install in your new profile, and then again,
remove the stuff that's not for you, you know, if you don't use YouTube, if that's your
daughter's well, you can, you can uninstall the YouTube, better YouTube plugin, things like that,
so that's one way to do it, the other way to do it, which is longer, it's definitely longer,
but it's a bit more, I don't know, I prefer doing it this way, because you get a clean install every
time, is what I do is I have a text document called my Firefox add-ons, and in that I just go through
the extensions that I've got installed, enough vertical order, and list them, and take a note of
them, I don't, it's not necessarily the full names, it's just enough that I could type into the
search bar and it would find it easily enough, that's all, I've got a text document so that
when I have a new Firefox profile, or when I need to set one off, if one's been corrupted or whatever,
that way I can just go through and add them one at a time, back onto it, it does take longer,
definitely does take longer, and you have to go through several restart Firefox to go through
them all, but at least then you're set a guarantee that a cleaner, a cleaner, renewal, basically,
so that's how to do your bookmarks and your extensions, out to a different profile, to a new profile,
so that is profiles in Firefox and Thunderbird, now the Thunderbird ones actually even more,
even more, it's something important to have separate profiles than Firefox in a way,
because you can have different email accounts for different projects that you do,
or you can have an email account for home, and an email account for business,
if you have a separate Thunderbird profile for each of those, you can be assured that you're not
going to accidentally send an email from the wrong email address, you know, send a personal email
address to a work colleague or a partner, and they're looking at it, go on, who is this person,
you know, because it's not the regular email address there, they see, or if your company needs to
be audited, and by using a personal email, you have sort of bypassed that auditing and could get
you in trouble, so that's other ways, I mean Thunderbird works well with Gmail, it also works with
IMAP, Gmail as well, albeit you have to add a plugin for that, and I don't for that, but again,
that means that you don't have to use the Gmail website to use Gmail essentially, you can use it
in Thunderbird, with these profiles as well, you can actually copy and paste these profiles and
take them with you, and have them on like portable versions of Firefox in Thunderbird,
so that you can take them on a USB thumb drive and take them on with portable apps,
or a USB, a thumb drive distribution, like popular X, or Google X or something,
so anyway, I think I'm probably starting to rumble a bit there, I've went on a bit longer than I
intended to do, I do apologise for that, I'm still getting used to these, so I'll end it there,
and if, as I say, my name is Gordon Sinclair, my handle on the IRC is ThistleWeb,
the, if you want to email me, it's Thistle.Webcast at googlemail.com,
and I hope that this has been of some use, and until next time, goodbye.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you
