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DMcCunney · 10-07-2018, 11:55 AM

And speaking of Firefox, I've been doing some experimentation.

I do a fair bit with Firefox profiles, and have an assortment, customized for different purposes.

I create a profile in Profile Manager. To do that, I launch Firefox as "firefox -p", and have a shortcut to do that. Profile Manager lets me create a profile with a specified name, and lets me choose where it is created. To make life easier, I keep them under \Mozilla\Profiles\Firefox, and the name I choose for the profile becomes the name of the directory created there. I can run Firefox using the profile as "firefox -p <profilename>"

I'm currently in a new profile called VanillaTest. It's a stock install of Firefox with no Addons. It currently takes about 440MB of memory. (My production profile takes about three times that, and part of the investigation here is which addons drive up RAM usage.)

But I want my bookmarks, site passwords and the like in any new profile. The files that contain what I want are formhistory.sqlite, handlers.json, key3.db, key4.db, logins.json, permissions.sqlite, persdict.dat, and places.sqlite.

I copied those from my production profile and put them in a 7z archive. When a new profile is created, I extract them into the new profile directory.

Run Firefox using that profile and the information is available

To make things more interesting, you can run more than one instance of Firefox at a time. To do so, you pass the -no-remote parameter. Each instance must use a different profile, as the first one to use a profile locks it. Another shortcut runs Firefox as "firefox -no-remote -p". That pops up a dialog box with a list of available profiles and I pick the one I want.

Another bit of hacking also plays with multiple profiles but I want the same bookmarks in all. Bookmarks/History are stored in the places.sqlite file.

NTFS5 supports *nix style symlinks, and I have a freware utility called Link Shell Extension taht can create them. LSE adds "Pick Link Source" and "Drop Link" to the Windows Explorer right click menu.

I have a master copy of the places.sqlite file. When I create a new profile, I may delete the basic places.sqlite file Firefox creates and replace it with a symlink to my master copy.

While you can't use the same profile in multiple instances of Firefox, you can use the same places.sqlite file via symlinks. The SQLite database manager that uses the various *.sqlite files uses atomic commits, and only one profile will be updating the places.sqlite file at any moment, so they won't step on each other's electronic toes and corruption won't occur.

It's all working fine so far, and is fun for suitable values of the term.
______
Dennis

10-07-2018, 11:55 AM	#451
DMcCunney New York Editor Posts: 6,384 Karma: 16540415 Join Date: Aug 2007 Device: PalmTX, Pocket eDGe, Alcatel Fierce 4, RCA Viking Pro 10, Nexus 7	And speaking of Firefox, I've been doing some experimentation. I do a fair bit with Firefox profiles, and have an assortment, customized for different purposes. I create a profile in Profile Manager. To do that, I launch Firefox as "firefox -p", and have a shortcut to do that. Profile Manager lets me create a profile with a specified name, and lets me choose where it is created. To make life easier, I keep them under \Mozilla\Profiles\Firefox, and the name I choose for the profile becomes the name of the directory created there. I can run Firefox using the profile as "firefox -p <profilename>" I'm currently in a new profile called VanillaTest. It's a stock install of Firefox with no Addons. It currently takes about 440MB of memory. (My production profile takes about three times that, and part of the investigation here is which addons drive up RAM usage.) But I want my bookmarks, site passwords and the like in any new profile. The files that contain what I want are formhistory.sqlite, handlers.json, key3.db, key4.db, logins.json, permissions.sqlite, persdict.dat, and places.sqlite. I copied those from my production profile and put them in a 7z archive. When a new profile is created, I extract them into the new profile directory. Run Firefox using that profile and the information is available To make things more interesting, you can run more than one instance of Firefox at a time. To do so, you pass the -no-remote parameter. Each instance must use a different profile, as the first one to use a profile locks it. Another shortcut runs Firefox as "firefox -no-remote -p". That pops up a dialog box with a list of available profiles and I pick the one I want. Another bit of hacking also plays with multiple profiles but I want the same bookmarks in all. Bookmarks/History are stored in the places.sqlite file. NTFS5 supports nix style symlinks, and I have a freware utility called Link Shell Extension taht can create them. LSE adds "Pick Link Source" and "Drop Link" to the Windows Explorer right click menu. I have a master copy of the places.sqlite file. When I create a new profile, I may delete the basic places.sqlite file Firefox creates and replace it with a symlink to my master copy. While you can't use the same profile* in multiple instances of Firefox, you can use the same places.sqlite file via symlinks. The SQLite database manager that uses the various .sqlite files uses atomic commits, and only one profile will be updating the places.sqlite file at any moment, so they won't step on each other's electronic toes and corruption won't occur. It's all working fine so far, and is fun for suitable values of the term. ______ Dennis* Last edited by DMcCunney; 10-07-2018 at 01:42 PM.