Firefox Profile - privacy, or have two Google accounts at once.

Date: 2011-05-10 00:00:00 -0400

Introduction

Firefox Profiles are specially useful when you need to open two Google accounts at once, or when you want to have some privacy. You can have as many profiles as you want or need, so you can have one for your Google Apps account, and another for your personal Gmail account.

Of course you can use the principle for Twitter or Facebook account in case you have two or more of them, or to see how your Drupal or Wordpress site looks like for not logged users, so you have one Profile logged to your blog, and other one not.

Create Firefox Profiles

Let's now see how to create them, first in a terminal window run:

firefox -no-remote -P

You will see a screen like this one:

Click on "Create Profile", and you will see this other screen.

Here just click Next

Now, enter the name of your new profile, do not use "default", and finally click finish.

From this time, when you start you will need to choose with profile to use, in that session, but only if you uncheck the "Don't ask at startup" checkbox in this screen.

And that is the screen you will see each time to start Firefox.

Start Firefox with a given profile

If you want to start Firefox directly with some specific profile, or if you already have a Firefox window opened, you will have to use this command from a terminal.

firefox -no-remote -P "<your profile name>"

In my case that would be:

firefox -no-remote -P "gmail"

You can create alias, or shortcuts or menus for this command, depending if you are using Gnome, KDE, OpenBox, Fluxbox or any other.

You will see this, the first time you open a new profile.

Conclusion

You can create as many Firefox profiles* as you need and use each of them for any specific purpose you may have in mind. One of it is privacy if you want to hide your searches from Google, you can have one profile where you are not logged in Google.

Another is to use two or more different accounts at once of Google, Twitter or Facebook, or any other web site you use.

You can also have different extensions on each profile, so you can have one with no-script and the other without it.

If you know more uses share with us.

If you liked this article please share it.

If you want to contact me in any other way, please use the contact page.

Go2Linux | Linux Operating System