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I use Ubuntu 12.04 and Firefox 15.0.1 I have some history saved in my Firefox browser. I find it useful to have them. But I don't want my friends or anyone to have a look at my history when they borrow my laptop. So I want to put a password to Firefox, i.e., when someone opens Firefox, they should be prompted for a password.

How do I do this?

EDIT: No, not a guest account. I want to know how it can be done like I asked. (I wouldn't want to logout and re-login with the guest account and give it to my friend, Besides file privileges are totally different in guest accounts. I want my friends to have normal file privileges :) .)

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Take a look at this guide: Protect your Firefox profile – amiregelz Sep 15 '12 at 13:37
You are way too trusting of your friends. – Michael Hampton Sep 15 '12 at 13:44
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Frankly, you're going about this the wrong way. If you don't trust people enough to use your browser session - which I totally understand, by the way - then you need to give them a seperate computer account, as has already been suggested. I understand that you apparently don't want to do this, but that doesn't make it the wrong answer. – RobM Sep 15 '12 at 16:20
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Hi. Don't take me wrong. The reason why I prefer the "firefox profile" solution is because I feel that is easier than logging out and logging back in as a guest. And, the file privileges. In the question, I ask "How to create a password to open firefox?" While Ubuntu profiles solution would work, I wanted one like this. Thank you everyone :D @amiregelz, thanks :) – learner Sep 15 '12 at 17:41

3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

you can use a different profile for yourself and others

start the profile manager (run firefox with firefox -ProfileManager)and create a new default profile for your friends to use

with the command firefox -P <profile> you can specify which profile firefox should load

hide a shortcut with these arguments for your own fast startup

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Ah. Thank You. This is what I wanted :) – learner Sep 15 '12 at 17:34
up vote 4 down vote

A better approach would be to create a guest account or separate accounts for all users on your ubuntu machine. This way there will be separate firefox settings for everyone. (actually for all apps for that matter)

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up vote 2 down vote

You create a second account on the laptop (a la windows 'guest' account).

Your friends log in with that username and password and can not access your files (including the firefox profile).

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