How to Create, Clone and Switch Profiles in Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a very popular web browser and is available for all the popular platforms. If you are using Linux then it is favored by almost all the distributions. Many of the Windows users find it hard to decide whether to use Chrome or Firefox on their computers.

Firefox browser saves all of your personalized settings and web browsing data in a folder called user profile folder. You can have more than one Firefox user profiles but can use only one of the as the default profile. Here is how you can create, clone and switch to different user profiles:

How to create a new blank Firefox profile

  1. Launch Firefox browser, type about:profiles and press Enter.
  2. Click on Create A New Profile button.Create,Clone and Switch Firefox Profiles
  3. This will start a new profile creation wizard, click on Next button to proceed.Create,Clone and Switch Firefox Profiles
  4. Choose a profile name, select a profile folder and click on the Finish button.Create,Clone and Switch Firefox Profiles
  5. You have successfully created  a new blank user profile.

How to clone an existing Firefox profile

  1. Follow the instructions above to create a new blank Firefox profile.
  2. For the existing user profile folder that you want to copy, click on Open Folder for the “Root Directory”.
  3. Similarly, open the “Root Directory” for the newly created profile.Create,Clone and Switch Firefox Profiles
  4. Close Firefox browser.
  5. Copy the contents of existing old profile folder into the new profile folder. Overwrite contents when asked.
  6. You now have exact clone of your old profile into the new profile.

How to switch different Firefox profiles

  1. Launch Firefox browser, type about:profiles and press Enter.
  2. If you have multiple profiles, then you can click on Set as default profile button to make that profile the default one to be loaded when you launch Firefox web browser. After this you have to restart Firefox to load the selected profile.
  3. If you just want to try a new profile temporarily, then you can click on Launch profile in new browser button. This will load a profile in a new instance of Firefox.