blog/source/_posts/firefox-instances-profiles.md

title	date	tags
How to run more than one Firefox instance	2019-04-07	Firefox Privacy

Running more than one Firefox instance allows you to use multiple cookies for a website. By default, you are limited to two separate cookies through regular and private windows. Using Firefox's profiles, you can use more than two.

For example, you are looking for item A and B at a shopping website using the private window but you prefer to keep the browsing separate as not to let the website knows that you are browsing both of them. Or you want to login to more than two accounts of a website.

A useful feature of Firefox is that it allows more than one profile, which otherwise would requires multiple operating system accounts. The feature even allows you to run multiple profiles at the same time by having multiple instances.

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There are two ways of creating profiles: (1) Fresh profile and (2) Clone existing profile.

Fresh profile

1. Create a new profile by running the following command:

firefox --no-remote -P 'new profile name'

2. Click "Create Profile...".

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3. Click "Next".

{% cloudinary 20190407/profile-wizard.png %}

4. Name the new profile and click "Finish".

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5. Once you are back to the profile manager, select "default", make sure "Use the selected profile..." and "Start Firefox".

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6. Launch Firefox with the newly created profile using the same command as above:

firefox --no-remote -P 'new profile name'

Protip: Create a launcher or keyboard shortcut to run the command.

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7. Just launch Firefox as usual for your current profile.

Clone profile

1. Notice the directory shown in step 4 in previous section, that is where profile(s) is stored.
2. Browse to the ~/.mozilla/firefox folder
3. To clone the default profile, simply select the xxxx.default and duplicate it by Edit: -> Duplicate, or copy to another folder, rename and move it back. Rename the cloned folder to desired name. In this example, I named it as profile z.

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4. Append the following line to profiles.ini, if there is no existing profile (other than the default), use [Profile1] instead.

[Profile2]
Name=Profile Z
IsRelative=1
Path=profile z

{% cloudinary 20190407/profiles-ini.png %}

5. Launch Firefox with the newly created profile using the same command as above (note the case-sensitive):

firefox --no-remote -P 'Profile Z'