On linux it is similar but with a few complexities. When multiple instances are running each one must use a separate profile. These will start regardless of other running instance but also any future Firefox start will not be able to detect these instances and so will start if no normal instance is found. On Windows only one instance of Firefox can run at a time unless the -no-remote command line argument is used for additional instances. If one exists then instead of starting up any command line arguments are sent to the existing instance and executed there. Before profile selection starts Firefox attempts to find an existing instance of Firefox on the system. One additional detail is what happens when there is already an instance of Firefox running. This difference caused various bugs and so there was a desire to make Developer Edition behave the same as other versions. This is achieved by ignoring the normal default profile marker in profiles.ini and instead using a profile named “dev-edition-default” as the default. One complication is Firefox Developer Edition which normally uses a different default profile from other versions of Firefox. The user is able to change the default profile at any time through the profile manager, this will change the default for all installs and versions of Firefox. If no profile was found and profiles.ini is empty then this is considered to be a first run of Firefox and a new empty default profile is created and used with no user interaction. If no profile was found and there are profiles listed in profiles.ini (this would indicate either a bad command line argument or none of the profiles being marked as the default) then a profile manager is shown to allow the user to select or create a new profile to use as the default. Suffice to say that once these checks are done Firefox will have either chosen a profile to run with or not found one at all. The details are not covered here since that behaviour has not changed. This default applies to any version or install of Firefox that the user runs.įirefox then checks a number of environment variables and command line arguments that may override the default profile. One of these would be marked as the default profile. It includes a few settings and a list of the known profiles and their location on disk. On startup Firefox would load a list of known profiles from a profiles.ini file located at a specific location in the user’s home directory. This article describes in detail how profile selection used to work, how it now works in Firefox 67 and how we migrate users from earlier versions. To that end changes were made to profile selection. During startup Firefox chooses that directory based on a few criteria including command line arguments, environment variables and a file that lists known and default profiles.įirefox 67 had the goal of allowing users to use different installs of Firefox simultaneously, without needing to configure command line arguments, and stopping the behaviour of using profiles with older versions of Firefox than they have seen since this behaviour is not supported and known to cause problems that are difficult to diagnose and fix and in some cases are serious enough to make Firefox completely unusable. A default desktop installation of Oracle Solaris 11.Understanding in depth the profile per installation featureĪt runtime Firefox uses a settings directory, or profile, to hold all of the user-specific settings such as bookmarks, history and extensions.Hands-On-Labs (accessed via the Toolbar Menu in Firefox).
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