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84 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
84 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 4
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Title: HPR0004: Firefox Profiles
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0004/hpr0004.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:11:36
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---
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Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. This is Peter Nicolitis from the Fresh
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Ubuntu podcast and I'm your host for this episode. Today I am going to cover how to
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move your Firefox profile from one computer to another. Now if you're like me,
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Firefox is your preferred web browser, regardless of what platform you're running it on.
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I run Firefox on my Linux desktops, my Macintosh machines, and my Windows PCs.
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So one of the things that I like to do is maintain a consistent set of settings
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across all of those machines. And I'm not talking about just bookmarks but add-ons
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and all sorts of other preferences. All of these things for Firefox are stored
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in a single directory. So you can basically, as long as you know where to find it,
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move your entire Firefox profile around from one computer to another.
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Now it doesn't matter whether you're working on Windows or Mac or Linux,
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you can take all of your extensions, your bookmarks, etc. and move them to any
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computer that you're using as long as you know where to look for them.
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And that's the trick. To find your Firefox profile on a Mac,
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it's pretty easy. Basically if you open up your Macintosh hard drive,
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then open up users, your username right there will be your home directory,
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and then library, application support, Firefox, and profiles.
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If you have only one Firefox profile, then there will be one folder there.
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And it usually is a random name. It's composed of a bunch of random letters and numbers.
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On my computer, for instance, my Firefox profile is named IJAWGK1.Default.
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That's on my Mac. So now you know where it is.
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Now if that's the profile that you want to move to another machine,
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you would just open up that folder, grab all of the files contents,
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and then maybe put them on a thumb drive or copy them across a network
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or store them in some centralized place, and name it something meaningful like Firefox profile.
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Then what you want to do is find your profile on your other machines.
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So on Windows, for instance, my profile is located under C,
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slash documents and settings. My username, just Peter on my machine,
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application data, Mozilla, Firefox, profiles.
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And again, if you have one profile on your system,
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you're going to see a directory under there, which again will be a random gibberish.
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Now it's not going to be the same as what it was called on the Mac.
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So here, for example, if you are moving everything out,
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you don't want to take the entire directory, the entire profile directory,
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that random alpha numeric string, you want to take whatever is in that folder,
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and then overwrite whatever is in the other machines folder.
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And what I generally do is I clear them out first.
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So on my target machine, I'll delete everything that's in that profile directory,
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and then just take the contents of my source machines,
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and then put the profile directory and put them in there.
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So once you've found those, let's see, we should cover out how you find it on Linux.
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Now on Linux, the profiles are a little easier to find.
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In your home directory, there will be a hidden directory called dot Mozilla.
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And under that, you should see your profile right there.
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So again, just look for a default, or sorry, something dot default.
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So on my Linux box, my profile was named VKUXFIT.default.
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The name doesn't matter, as long as you can look at it
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and identify it as a profile directory, then you're all set.
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So once again, what I do is I generally fire up Firefox one time on a new machine,
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and then I go into the profiles directory, so I know where I'm copying my files too,
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and I delete everything that's in there, and then I go back to my old Windows box,
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or Mac, or whatever I'm copying my profile from, grab up all the files,
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and either copy them over a network or stick them on a thumb drive,
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and then just dump the contents of that profile's folder into my target.
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The next time you fire up Firefox, it should look very much the same as it did on your original machine.
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And this includes, if you have it configured to open tabs for sites that you were last visiting,
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you'll get the same tabs opening up.
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All of your cookies will come along, so your stored passwords are all there, and all of your add-ons.
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And that's the biggest thing that I find is that, you know, if my save preferences and stuff are there,
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it's just like coming home every time you fire up your browser.
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It's really nice not to have to reconfigure everything.
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So that's it. That's all you need to do to keep your Firefox profile with you
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when you move from computer to computer.
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You can do the same thing for Thunderbird, which will probably cover in a future episode.
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And there are also ways that you can use tools such as R-Sync to keep your profile synchronized with you automatically.
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But those are topics for another day.
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So that's it for this episode.
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Until next time, you can follow me at fresubuntu.org,
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that's the fresubuntu podcast, or on my blog at pn72.com.
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Thanks for listening and have a great day.
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Thank you for listening to Half Republic Radio.
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HPR is sponsored by caro.net.
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So head on over to caro.enet for all your hopes and needs.
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Thanks for watching.
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Thanks for watching.
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