Hi all,
If I open from command line (Win + R):
"FirefoxPortable.exe" -ProfileManager
It launches profile manager and i can make profiles and launch them, is it still portable at this point? I make profile in custom folder on my desktop.
Whenever I do this though Firefox is reading/creating profiles.ini at "C:\Documents and Settings\Noitidart\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox"
this is equivalent to: alert(OS.Constants.Path.userApplicationDataDir);
Is there any way to make it read profiles.ini from my FirefoxPortable directory?
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profiles.ini is for locally installed profiles only. If you want another profile or two for Firefox Portable, use the 2nd profile utility as linked on the Firefox Portable home and support pages. In the PA.c Platform, you can rename these as you'd like once installed.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
It seems to work though, we can launch FirefoxPortable.exe with -ProfileManager command and make a new profile and launch it successfully, even on a computer with Firefox installation, so it seems portable is running it. My only concern is: Aside from profiles.ini, is it writing any data to non-portable locations?
I managed to make it bypass the reading of profiles.ini by passing it the path of the profile rather than the profile name.
Just use the 2nd Profile launcher. It handles it for you and passes things properly. We don't support use of the local profiles.ini at all. It's designed for a local Firefox install.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
This is noit from my school account.
Thanks much for that reply and patience with me John. The reason why I can't use 2nd profile launcher is because i am an addon dev, and due to popular request I'm trying to make my addon, Profilist, compatabile with portable.
I bypassed profiles.ini by using command line option of "-profile PATH_TO_CUSTOM_PROFILE_DIR", so that's no longer an issue. I'm just wondering if when I use this command line option do you know if it is writing to any non-portable directories.
Just starting firefox.exe with -profile isn't enough to make it portable. It'll allow the profile to exist on the portable drive, but that's about it. It'll leave behind a few registry keys in HKCU as well as directories in APPDATA. Plus, some extensions will fail when you move PCs. The FirefoxPortable.exe launcher handles cleaning up the leftover bits and adjusting paths within prefs.js as well as the extensions sqlite datastore. It only does this for the profile stored in FirefoxPortable\Data\profile, though. That's why we also make available FirefoxPortable2ndProfile which has its own Data\profile that is also properly handled while utilizing the main Firefox Portable's bundled copy of Firefox. Multiple profiles are allowed just by installing multiple copies of 2nd Profile and naming them as you'd like.
I'm not sure there is a way to accomplish what you are attempting strictly within an extension due to the way Firefox handles restarts and crashes.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Ah thanks for this detailed discussion, I was hoping for this.
What if before changing profiles, i renamed the profile folder to profileBackup
and then the profile i want to switch to i make that folder name profile?
Also if you could please check my addon working with creating/launching/switching profiles with -profile please follow:
To install it, please install GitHub Extension Installer addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/github-extension-installer/
Then go to the repository (https://github.com/yajd/Profilist/tree/patch-4) and click on "Add to Firefox". Then if you open firefox panel click "Create New Profile" that will make new profile and launch it. Would it be possible if you could monitor it as you know FirefoxPortable, and see if this method is ok? Because I am still using FirefoxPortable.exe I think it should do the proper cleanups, I understand some addons may not work, but the cleanup is the important part to me and Profilist users.
This version is meant for install on portable only, it won't work from non-portable.
This is my test repository, the main repository is https://github.com/Noitidart/Profilist but this is not important for us right now.
Also all credit to Wladamir Palant for helping me figure out how to bypass the profiles.ini