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I have several Firefox profiles and I have them pinned to my taskbar.

Since i installed windows 7 SP1 I can no longer have both there. Is there a way to fix this so that I can have multiple instances of the same program pinned at once?

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  • See my answer here. (Possible duplicate)
    – hegearon
    Jul 30, 2011 at 9:02

3 Answers 3

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In case anyone stumbles upon this, it's actually really simple to setup Firefox profiles to group into separate taskbar pins like the Chrome profile manager works.

I like to have a separate "personal" and "work" Firefox profile with separate shortcuts pinned side by side:

• Launch Firefox and go to about:config.

• Add New > Boolean > "taskbar.grouping.useprofile" > true.

• Next, close and relaunch a new instance of Firefox using RUN > "firefox.exe -P [profile] -no-remote"

• Pin this app icon to the taskbar.

• Now, navigate to C:\Users[profile]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar.

• Edit properties on the now pinned shortcut to include the same "-P [profile] -no-remote" in the target.

Repeat this procedure for every profile you would like to pin separately to your taskbar and each profile will have its own grouping accordingly.

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  • 1
    This answer is neat. It (currently) appears to be the supported method to do what's being asked. Only it's not intuitive (a Firefox quirk). More info here (Bugzilla).
    – Marc.2377
    Jun 30, 2016 at 20:36
  • This process still works for me on Windows 10. Thanks!
    – Johann
    Jul 8, 2022 at 18:03
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You either pin an application or a document to an application. I guess you want the first behavior where you have more than one pinned application on the taskbar itself. I thus suggest you to rename each instance of Firefox and leave the default (in which new links should open) named firefox.exe.

So you have:

  • firefox.exe (new links)
  • social.exe (profile optimized for social stuff)
  • multimedia.exe (profile optimized for music/movies/...)
  • work/school/research.exe (profile optimized for more productive things)
  • ...

Then just change the shortcut properties so that each loads a different profile.

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  • It kind of worked but is buggy and now annoying so it isn't acceptable anymore. (I tried changing the icon like others suggested but i think i did it wrong) Its very buggy, if one instance is open i cant click on the other (so its pointless to having it there)
    – user3109
    Apr 3, 2011 at 21:30
  • I don't know of any other way, multiple instances get grouped up under one thing. Perhaps what you meant can be solved by turning off the combine feature under the task bar properties? So the instances don't get grouped up under the same process. Apr 3, 2011 at 22:29
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    actually i may have been confused. I meant if one instance was opened then the shortcut would not open. But it does. Maybe i was confused bc one of the two shortcuts disappeared on restart. But that isnt so bad if i leave a shortcut on my desktop and pin it after i restart. kind of annoying but not terrible
    – user3109
    Apr 4, 2011 at 5:01
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    Another catch is if i open up the 2nd instance, to open the first i need to shift+click it. Which one might think opens the 2nd shortcut BUT IT DOESNT. wtf. I dont know why sp1 remove (or broke?) this feature. It worked perfectly before SP1
    – user3109
    Apr 4, 2011 at 5:19
  • So this worked before SP1. I guess an option could be to place the RTM version of explorer.exe of the responsibe DLL back, I don't see any other easy options... Apr 4, 2011 at 15:07
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Enable this first : http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Show-or-hide-file-name-extensions

  • Create an empty file somewhere and call it "firefox1.exe"
  • Drag & pin it to taskbar
  • Rename the file to "firefox1.bat"
  • Shift+Right-click the taskbar icon & select properties
  • Change the target to ".bat" from ".exe" (since you renamed your file)
  • Edit firefox1.bat & add start <path to firefox app>\firefox1.exe

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