Last week I had mentioned creating a Firefox profile in Dropbox, giving you all the benefits of a mobile and sync-able profile; this week I deliver! I will go through the process for both Mac and PC, talk a little bit about why this is cool, and some things to watch out for.
One word of warning. If you are concerned at all about the security of your profile, store sensitive information, or save passwords in your browser then I would tell you NOT TO FOLLOW THIS TUTORIAL. Dropbox provides little to no security for your data, so unless you are encrypting and decrypting on your own, know that your data is vulnerable and essentially open for people to see while it is syncing.
You will need a Dropbox account and Firefox for this, and also you need to be an administrator for some tasks. Also for both Mac and PC you need to have your hidden files on display: this will make editing some files later on much easier. With that let us begin!
A quick (and very brief) back story about how Firefox manages the user experience. When you start Firefox up, it loads all of your settings from a profile it manages and keeps tabs on. Your profile contains everything: browsing history, bookmarks, saved passwords, add-ons, style choices: you name it and it’s in there. For the everyday user one profile is fine, but when you’re a developer monkeying around with stuff, its nice to have a sandbox to play in and keep everything else safe. So to create a new profile we’ll have to start the Firefox Profile Manager.
Mozilla provides a good tutorial for getting this going, so I won’t re-invent the wheel for this section. Later I will show you an alternative method for starting the profile manager, but for now follow their guide. You can find Windows and Mac sections respectively. When you complete these steps, you should be presented with a screen similar to the one below.
You will want to uncheck the “Don’t ask at startup” option, because you will want to switch between profiles in the future. Click “Create Profile” and click “Next.” The next screen should give you a text field to name your account and a default location for your profile. Write down or copy this location, you will need it later in this tutorial. Click the “Choose Folder” option and navigate to your Dropbox folder. Create a new folder to put your profile in and click “OK” for Windows, or “Open” for Mac. Write down this location as well, you will need it later too. Finally click finish. You’ve got a completely mobile profile now! No more tracking down addons!
Now that your profile is mobile, you must tell all your other browsers where this profile is. On your other machines, navigate to the default profile location you copied down earlier. It may not be 100% the same, but it will be very close.
For example on Windows, this location should be under your account (Users\YOUR-ACCOUNT-NAME) then AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox. (The default profile location is actually \mozilla\firefox\profiles, but we need to go up one folder level.)
The Mac structure is very different. You will still be under your account, but you need to go to Library\Application Support\Firefox. (Again the default profile location is actually \Library\Application Support\Firefox\Profiles, but we need to go up one folder level.)
For both systems however, a file called profiles.ini will exist here. Open this file in your favorite text editor (Mac will try to open in a Windows VM if installed, so drag it to TextEdit or some other text program.) You should see a file similar to the one below:
This file tells Firefox where to look for profiles. The initial machine you worked on should contain 2 entries like mine, where as your current machine should only have one. I won’t go into detail on this post what these lines do, so for now just take my word. Put your cursor after “Default=1″ and hit enter twice and enter the following text:
[Profile1]
Name=’Your-Profile-Name’
IsRelative=0 (IsRelative is equal to zero, not the letter ‘O’)
Path=’Path-To-Dropbox-Profile-Folder’
Where ‘Your-Profile-Name’ can be whatever you want your profile to be named, and ‘Path-To-Dropbox-Profile-Folder’ is the absolute path to your folder (C: and everything for Windows, User\ for Mac.) The last change to this file is to change the value of StartWithLastProfile from one to zero. This will start the profile manager so you can select from your profiles.
That’s it! Redo this last part for as many computers as you want to access your profile! This trick could also work if you wanted to put a profile on a Flash drive or other external media device.
Happy tinkering!
Until then,