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Firefox saves your personal information such as bookmarks, passwords, and user preferences in a set of files called your profile, which is stored in a separate location from the Firefox program files.

Table Of Contents

What is a profile?

Any changes you make while using Firefox are stored in files so that they can be used the next time you run Firefox. These changes can be obvious, like your home page, or changes you've made to the toolbar, but also include things like your history, what sites you've visited, and text you've entered into forms like search fields. They're all stored in the same location, called a profile folder.

These files are kept separately from the program files that Firefox uses to run, which don't change. This means that you can uninstall Firefox without losing your settings, and that if something goes wrong with an update your information will still be there. It also means you don't have to reinstall Firefox in order to clear your information, or troubleshoot a problem.

How to find your profile

Windows:

Each profile is stored on your hard drive in a profile folder. The following table identifies the default locations of Firefox profiles on various operating systems.

  • The following examples refer to the default profile. The corresponding profile folder is named xxxxxxxx.default, where xxxxxxxx represents a random string of 8 characters.

Operating System
Profile Folder Path
Windows Vista/XP/2000 %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
Windows 98/Me C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\

  • (Windows Vista, XP, and 2000) %APPDATA% is shorthand for the C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\ folder (Windows Vista) or the C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\ folder (Windows XP/2000), which depends on your Windows user account name.

Windows Vista

  1. Click the Windows Start button, and type %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ in the Start Search box near the bottom of the Start menu, without pressing Enter. A list of profiles will appear in the top left of the Start menu.
  2. Click on any of the profiles (e.g. xxxxxxxx.default) to open it with Windows Explorer.

On Windows 2000 and XP

  1. Click the Windows Start button, and select Run....


  2. Type in %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ then click OK.

  3. Windows Explorer opens a folder containing your profiles.
  4. Double-click the profile folder you wish to open (e.g. the xxxxxxxx.default folder).
Mac OS:

Each profile is stored on your hard drive in a profile folder. The default location of the Firefox profile is ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/.

  • xxxxxxxx represents a random string of 8 characters.
  1. Open Finder and go to your home folder. Note: your home folder is usually the name of your Mac user account
  2. From your home folder open /Library/, then /Application Support/, then /Firefox/, then /Profiles/.
  3. Open your profile folder. By default, it is /xxxxxxxx.default/ where xxxxxxxx represents a random string of 8 characters.
Linux:

Each profile is stored on your hard drive in a profile folder. The default location of the Firefox profile is ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/.

  • xxxxxxxx represents a random string of 8 characters.
  1. (Ubuntu) Click the Places menu on the top right of the screen and select Home Folder. A File Browser window will appear.
  2. Click the View menu and select Show Hidden Files if it isn't already checked.
  3. Double click the folder marked .mozilla.
  4. Double click the folder marked firefox. Your profile folders are within this folder.

Making changes to your profile

More advanced users may wish to make certain changes to their profile, or you might be advised to do so to fix a problem you're having with Firefox.

Managing profiles

Managing profiles explains how to do things like create a new profile and delete an old one.

Moving your profile information to another location

Backing up your information explains how to back up your profile, how to restore a profile backup, and how to move your profile information to a different location on your hard drive or to another computer.


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Page last modified on Friday 24 of October, 2008 18:22:39 PST.
Contributors to this page: Chris_Ilias , olirl2004 , zzxc , Bo , Lucy , ehsan , np , Vectorspace , skulvis , AliceWyman , admin , mozbrowser and RayKiddy .
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