Ryfujk

Recently I have been more and more using profiles in Firefox.

I have one for every member of the family, then some for proxied firefoxes (tor, i2p, freenet), then a "guest" default profile, and several profiles for development purposes.

Soooo, profile management starts to become important. And the very first problem I have, is to reorder them, for instance in this order :

Personal

Girlfriend

Children

Dev1

Dev2

Dev3

Testing

Freenet

Tor

etc ...

So, is there an addon, a trick to have that ordering ? I guess the other way round is to use gnome / mate, etc. menu options to start those profiles and manage them from there. But I'm now looking for a Firefox-only solution.

Ok, after testing many addons, I found a way to reorder my profiles. It is not in an addon (should be main feature in Firefox, but anyway...).

The trick is to edit your profiles.ini file. It is located, in linux, in ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini.

First, backup:

cp ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini.bak

Second, edit:

vim ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini

You can then copy and paste the lines in order to have this the order you want :

[General]

StartWithLastProfile=1



[Profile0]

Name=Default

IsRelative=1

Path=fhsdjsufh.Default

Default=1



[Profile1]

Name=Myself

IsRelative=1

Path=dfhfkvldk.default



[Profile2]

Name=Children

IsRelative=1

Path=kfmfpoernv.Children



[Profile3]

Name=Friends

IsRelative=1

Path=fjvovbswk.Friends

I don't know if this is the best way, but it works. Please care to keep the formatting and titling as they are, just copy the lines between the [Profilex] titles.

Source : Mozillazine

I also use a lot of profiles. I use MozBackup to backup a base profile
with addons I like. I restore that base onto profiles I later create using
the popup when I run firefox.exe -P -no-remote.

I haven't found a way to sort the profile list in that popup in either Firefox
nor MozBackup so I wrote a python script that sorts the entries by name in profiles.ini.

I'm on Windows but I use the Linux subsystem with Debian flavor to run this script.
To install python 3.6:

apt-get install curl git build-essential zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libreadline-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev

curl https://pyenv.run | bash

pyenv install 3.6.8

pyenv local 3.6.8

Here is the script:

#!/usr/bin/env python3.6



import configparser

import re



config = configparser.ConfigParser()

config.optionxform = str

# this option is mandatory as list in popup will be blank

# if we let configparser default to lowercase option key.

config.read('profiles.ini')



nconfig = configparser.ConfigParser()

nconfig.optionxform = str

nconfig['General'] = config['General']



profiles = [section for section in config.sections() if re.match('^Profile', section)]

sorted_profiles = sorted(profiles, key=lambda profile: config[profile]['Name'])



for idx, profile in enumerate(sorted_profiles):

    nconfig[f"Profile{idx}"] = config[profile]

    # dict are sorted in python 3.6

    # it seems profiles don't need to be renamed,

    # but let's fake we created them in order anyway.



with open('profiles.ini.new', 'w') as f:

    nconfig.write(f, space_around_delimiters=False)