hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0004.txt

Episode: 4
Title: HPR0004: Firefox Profiles
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0004/hpr0004.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:11:36

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Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. This is Peter Nicolitis from the Fresh
Ubuntu podcast and I'm your host for this episode. Today I am going to cover how to
move your Firefox profile from one computer to another. Now if you're like me,
Firefox is your preferred web browser, regardless of what platform you're running it on.
I run Firefox on my Linux desktops, my Macintosh machines, and my Windows PCs.
So one of the things that I like to do is maintain a consistent set of settings
across all of those machines. And I'm not talking about just bookmarks but add-ons
and all sorts of other preferences. All of these things for Firefox are stored
in a single directory. So you can basically, as long as you know where to find it,
move your entire Firefox profile around from one computer to another.
Now it doesn't matter whether you're working on Windows or Mac or Linux,
you can take all of your extensions, your bookmarks, etc. and move them to any
computer that you're using as long as you know where to look for them.
And that's the trick. To find your Firefox profile on a Mac,
it's pretty easy. Basically if you open up your Macintosh hard drive,
then open up users, your username right there will be your home directory,
and then library, application support, Firefox, and profiles.
If you have only one Firefox profile, then there will be one folder there.
And it usually is a random name. It's composed of a bunch of random letters and numbers.
On my computer, for instance, my Firefox profile is named IJAWGK1.Default.
That's on my Mac. So now you know where it is.
Now if that's the profile that you want to move to another machine,
you would just open up that folder, grab all of the files contents,
and then maybe put them on a thumb drive or copy them across a network
or store them in some centralized place, and name it something meaningful like Firefox profile.
Then what you want to do is find your profile on your other machines.
So on Windows, for instance, my profile is located under C,
slash documents and settings. My username, just Peter on my machine,
application data, Mozilla, Firefox, profiles.
And again, if you have one profile on your system,
you're going to see a directory under there, which again will be a random gibberish.
Now it's not going to be the same as what it was called on the Mac.
So here, for example, if you are moving everything out,
you don't want to take the entire directory, the entire profile directory,
that random alpha numeric string, you want to take whatever is in that folder,
and then overwrite whatever is in the other machines folder.
And what I generally do is I clear them out first.
So on my target machine, I'll delete everything that's in that profile directory,
and then just take the contents of my source machines,
and then put the profile directory and put them in there.
So once you've found those, let's see, we should cover out how you find it on Linux.
Now on Linux, the profiles are a little easier to find.
In your home directory, there will be a hidden directory called dot Mozilla.
And under that, you should see your profile right there.
So again, just look for a default, or sorry, something dot default.
So on my Linux box, my profile was named VKUXFIT.default.
The name doesn't matter, as long as you can look at it
and identify it as a profile directory, then you're all set.
So once again, what I do is I generally fire up Firefox one time on a new machine,
and then I go into the profiles directory, so I know where I'm copying my files too,
and I delete everything that's in there, and then I go back to my old Windows box,
or Mac, or whatever I'm copying my profile from, grab up all the files,
and either copy them over a network or stick them on a thumb drive,
and then just dump the contents of that profile's folder into my target.
The next time you fire up Firefox, it should look very much the same as it did on your original machine.
And this includes, if you have it configured to open tabs for sites that you were last visiting,
you'll get the same tabs opening up.
All of your cookies will come along, so your stored passwords are all there, and all of your add-ons.
And that's the biggest thing that I find is that, you know, if my save preferences and stuff are there,
it's just like coming home every time you fire up your browser.
It's really nice not to have to reconfigure everything.
So that's it. That's all you need to do to keep your Firefox profile with you
when you move from computer to computer.
You can do the same thing for Thunderbird, which will probably cover in a future episode.
And there are also ways that you can use tools such as R-Sync to keep your profile synchronized with you automatically.
But those are topics for another day.
So that's it for this episode.
Until next time, you can follow me at fresubuntu.org,
that's the fresubuntu podcast, or on my blog at pn72.com.
Thanks for listening and have a great day.
Thank you for listening to Half Republic Radio.
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