So I added a new SSD to my desktop computer with the intent of moving the entire operating system to this new faster drive. But in the meanwhile, I wanted the Firefox web browser profile to load from the faster SSD so that it can load much faster. It turned out that moving a Firefox profile folder is much easier than it seems to be.
Here is how you can quickly move your existing Firefox Profile folder to a different location, a different partition or a different drive:
- Launch Firefox and enter about:profiles in its address bar. Click on the Open Folder button next to the default profile folders (root directory). Close Firefox window after the folder has been opened.
- Press Win+R hotkey, type firefox –ProfileManager in the run dialog and press Enter.
- In the Firefox Profile Manager window, click on the Create Profile button.
- In the process of creating a new profile, choose a custom Firefox profile name (such as FirefoxSSD), and choose a folder on the drive (such as D:\FirefoxSSD) where you want to move the existing profile.
- Back in the Firefox Profile Manager window, select the new profile, ensure that checkbox “Use the selected profile without asking at startup” and then click on the button Start Firefox. When Firefox starts, just close it down again.
- Copy all the files from inside the folder opened in step 1 above (old profile folder) to the newly created folder in the step 4 above. If prompt comes for overwriting files, then choose yes.
- Start Firefox as usual, it will now load the profile from its new location.
This method can be used to move the Firefox profile folder to a faster SSD or to a hard drive that as much more space. If you move the profile to an SSD or M.2, then you are definitely going to experience some performance boost in Firefox.