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Is there a way to have different taskbar icons for two different Firefox profiles? I have two shortcuts which point to bat scripts which launch Firefox profiles in following manner:

start "" "D:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe" -no-remote -P "default"

It's easy to change icons for shortcuts which sit on desktop, but when I launch Firefox instances they both have the same standard icon.

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related problems:

It seems there's no good, consistently working solution at this moment (2011-08-20).

3 Answers 3

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If somebody is OK with running beta version of FF (or Aurora or Nightly) then installing and using stable with one profile and beta with the other one seems to solve the problem.

  • it's possible to pin both profiles to taskbar
  • these profiles can have different icons

How to do it:

  1. Install stable version of FF and beta version in separate folders (you can get beta from here)
  2. Create second profile using ProfileManager
  3. Add to the beta shortut target parameter -no-remote -p yourprofilename
  4. Change the icon simply by rightclicking on the pinned icon, rightclicking properties and the icon menu item

It seems to works flawlessly. If somebody has a way to run two stable versions in this manner I'll gladly accept such an answer.

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  1. Right click on Taskbar launcher for which you want to change the icon.
  2. Right click on the task list item with the Program name (eg. "Mozilla Firefox")
  3. Click on Properties.

You can change the launcher icon in this property dialog. You may have to restart explorer or logout/login for the changes to take effect.

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  • Thanks, it works (kind of) - I didn't know about this way of changing icons. The problem is that it behaves strangely - when I have first FF profile started and run second, the second one gets correctly different icon. But when no profile is running and I start the second one it gets the standard icon of the first one. Not to mention that it's impossible to pin both of these profiles to taskbar (but that's whole another problem). Aug 20, 2011 at 9:46
  • Have you tried starting Firefox directly, without a batch script? For the second shortcut, you can pin a random program and edit its shortcut to point to Firefox. Both icons stayed the way they should for me. However, Windows won't highlight the second launcher when you launch it, instead the first one will be shown as open. Aug 20, 2011 at 17:47
  • Yes, it works as you described - if I pin some other program and change icon it stays with this swapped icon, but when I run FF it's highlighted as new, default icon. Thanks for the tips, they're helpful (I'll upvote it when I can), but it doesn;t solve the problem fully. I believe Mozilla has to change FF behaves (each profile has to have different application ID). Aug 22, 2011 at 10:50
  • You're right. What you need is for each Firefox profile instance to have a different AppUserModelIDs. But this involves patching the Firefox code and building on your own or possibly writing a custom app that will launch Firefox with under a forced ID. Either way, there is no simple solution. Aug 22, 2011 at 23:42
  • It seems that beta versions have different AppID. If somebody is OK with running beta then it seems it all works as expected - I've described it my answer. Thanks a lot again for tips! Aug 23, 2011 at 10:32
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I found a Firefox extension which sets the AppID based on the profile name. This will allow different profiles to appear under different icons on the Windows 7 taskbar. It is available here: http://code.google.com/p/win7appid/issues/detail?id=3#c0

Within the discussion, there's a link to download the "win7appid-ff4-profile.zip" zip file, which should be extracted to your Firefox Extensions folder.

There's also an updated script for FF5 and later, in comment 8 of the discussion. This should be pasted into the following file, overwriting the existing code: components\win7appid.js

Note that I haven't been able to choose different icons for each profile - they show on the taskbar as the standard Firefox icon.

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