Multiple Profile Support for Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird, Portable Editions 1.0

John T. Haller's picture
Submitted by John T. Haller on February 10, 2010 - 6:25pm

Firefox logoPortableApps.com is proud to announce the release of multiple profile support for Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition, Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition and Mozilla Sunbird, Portable Edition. Secondary profiles allow you to have another complete set of settings (bookmarks, emails, calendars, preferences, etc) for each portable app. It's great for sharing your flash drive with someone else, development and testing extensions or separating work/school stuff and personal stuff. The secondary launchers work with all versions and all languages and are available from the portable apps' support pages today. And, as always, they are open source and completely free.

Read on for more details...

Mozilla®, Firefox®, Thunderbird®, Sunbird® and their respective logos are registered trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation and are used under license.

Features and How To

secondary_profiles_small.pngMultiple profile support is easy to add for Firefox Portable, Thunderbird Portable and Sunbird Portable on your USB flash drive or your local PC. After installing the PortableApps.com Platform to the root of your drive and installing Firefox, Thunderbird and/or Sunbird, you just need to install the appropriate 2nd profile app(s) to the same location. They're small (adding under 200K to the profile itself) and quick to install. The full details are included in each apps' support topic:

When complete, your PortableApps.com Menu can look like the one at the right. Of course, you can easily right-click and rename any of the icons to anything you'd like ("Firefox (Development)", for example). You can add a 3rd or 4th profile by following the instructions at the support links above as well.

PortableApps.com Installer / PortableApps.com Format

All the 2nd Profile apps are packaged in a PortableApps.com Installer so they will automatically detect an existing PortableApps.com installation when your drive is plugged in. And they're in PortableApps.com Format, so it automatically works with the PortableApps.com Suite including the Menu and Backup Utility.

Download

All the 2nd profile installers are available from the support pages for each app: Firefox Portable 2nd Profile, Thunderbird Portable 2nd Profile and Sunbird Portable 2nd Profile. Get them today!

Story Topic:

Comments

John T. Haller's picture

Seems I neglected to enable comments on this news story. So, if anyone has anything to add, please do so Smile

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Thanks John T. Haller for all the great work.

In "Using a Second (or Third) Profile with Firefox Portable" it says:

"Note that only one profile can be used at a time, even with MultipleInstances turned on in the advanced launcher INI. This is a limitation of Firefox itself."

witch is wrong since i'm currently using 2 at the same time.

All the explications are here:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Opening_a_new_instance_of_Firefox_with_another...

I just edited the ini file and it worked.

Alcasar

First and foremost, thank you for all the great work you do here.

As part of a big exercise in trying to figure out a totally portable installation that can also be used on my local hard drive, I am trying to get TBird and FFox to use profiles in a different branch of the directory tree. So, for example :

Program is in C:\My\Apps\PortableApps\ThunderbirdPortable\
Data is in C:\My\Docs\Current\Thunderbird\

The _relative_ position of these folders will always be the same.

I am getting a bit confused with the various .ini files. Is it possible to use Thunderbird2ndProfile to make ThunderbirdPortable look for its profile in somewhere like ..\..\..\Docs\Current\Thunderbird ?

If I recall correctly, the ini files can only be use to go deeper into the hierarchy and not up. I'm not sure though.

And for the future: its better to post support questions in the forum and not as a comment on a news story!

"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate