FireFox – Identifying Profiles and Folders

Firefox profiles are custom configurations of your settings, activities and layout within the browser. In a fully active profile this can include your GUI theme, some options, plugins, bookmarks, history, browser activity, passwords and everything else. For each profile, this data is stored locally, in two separate folders on the system where you have been using Firefox.  I’ll show you how to identify your profile and where its folders are located.

There’s so many ways to access your profile folders. From within FireFox or directly from Windows Explorer. Every profile created with the DEFAULT settings has 2 folders. Each with the exact same name in both locations. Twin Folders.

The default locations for Firefox profile folders are as follows:

Using the shortcuts, you can quickly access these directories from 3 different places:

**Keep in mind, FF is designed for multiple users so there can be more than one profile stored.

The methods above are ways to locate all the profile folders when in their default location, using Explorer, outside of FireFox. Easy enough. But, maybe you need to access a specific profile. To ensure that you are accessing the correct profile, its best to confirm this from within FF. Here’s how.  

1: Launch Firefox

**Take a look around. Make sure the profile you want to access is currently loaded. If all your stuff is there, like bookmarks, history, etc. then you’re good. You can skip step 3. If not, proceed and we will address this.  

2: Type “about:profiles” in the URL bar and press ENTER. The ABOUT PROFILES page should appear.

3: On the About Profiles page, there may be more than one profile available. If the profile that was loaded when launching FireFox is NOT the one you are looking for, you’ve got two options.

A: Launch a different profile in a new browser window.

B: Set a different profile as default, then MANUALLY restart.

(DO NOT use the retarded “Restart Normally” button that FireFox provides. It doesn’t seem to do much.)

And if it’s not obvious how to do either of these just by looking at the screen….. Here’s to you kid.

To prevent potential confusion, I prefer option B.  

**Each time you do this, look around and examine the setup, plugins, history, bookmarks, etc. until you can confirm that the active profile is the one you are looking for. If you manually restart as suggested, FireFox will load whichever profile is marked as default upon re-launching. Regardless of which profile was last in use.  

4: Once the correct profile is loaded, on the About Profiles page just make sure you select the profile that states exactly: “This is the profile in use and it cannot be deleted.”

** If you KNOW what you are doing and you are sure, you can access other profiles that are not currently loaded from this page as well. I wouldn’t suggest it though. Loading the profile first and having a look around ensures that the correct profile will be accessed, preventing user error.

On the “About Profiles” page, take note of the directories. Folders are separated by a backslash. The last folder in each directory (highlighted green) is the actual profile folder, where all the data is stored. These are the folders we want.

There are two ways to access your profile folders from here:

Either way, you should have access to the profile folders themselves as well as the content within. Be careful!

FireFox Profiles Identified, Folders Located!