A bit more elaborate answer about Firefox's profile manager:
You can use command line arguments to perform various things. This has such an advantage that you can create several shortcuts on your desktop with those parameters.
So, first
will open profile manager. You can create profiles here, and choose the one you want to use, at startup time.
About -no-remote switch
- There's another parameter
-no-remote
which you can use to have more than one profile opened at the same time.
- There can be max one Firefox instance opened without this parameter, and infinitely many opened with this parameter
- You can also open Firefox always with
-no-remote
switch. However, this comes with a drawback. Read below.
Keep mind that if:
- Firefox is your default browser
- you click a link in an external application (say, Word, PDF reader, or IM),
then:
- it will be opened in the Firefox instance opened without
-no-remote
.
- If you opened all instances of Firefox with
-no-remote
, you'll get an error message and the link will not be opened.
Creating shortcuts to different profiles
After you've issued firefox.exe -p
and created profiles named, say, Alice
and Bob
, you can then create separate links on your desktop / quick launch / start menu:
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p Alice -no-remote
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p Bob -no-remote
(or perhaps without -no-remote
for one of them).
You can also just make it
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p
and each time you open Firefox, you'll be prompted to choose the profile you want. Just make sure to update all the shortcuts you have on desktop / quick launch / start menu.
Why at all complicating life so much with the command line args instead of installing an add-on?
I already use >30 add-ons. If I used add-on for everything I wanted to configure, I'd end up with twice as many ;) but of course, YMMV.