Firefox 138 introduces a revamped profile management system that allows users to create independent browser sessions with unique settings, history, bookmarks, and more. By default, this new profile interface isn’t enabled for all users yet, but you can manually activate it.
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Firefox 138 brings a significant upgrade to its profile management system, offering users more flexibility and control over their browsing experience. It manages independent browser sessions, each with its own unique settings, browsing history, bookmarks, add-ons, and internal databases. Firefox stores all profiles in individual subdirectories. This separation ensures that data from one profile does not interfere with another, and allows managing multiple workflows, testing environments, or keeping personal and professional activities distinct.
To make profile management more user-friendly, Firefox 138 introduces a dedicated section in the main menu. This new interface simplifies the process of switching between existing profiles or creating new ones.
Additionally, the user can personalize each profile with its own color scheme, icon, and name, allowing users to easily identify and differentiate between their various browsing sessions.
While the feature is not yet enabled by default for all users, it will gradually roll out to a wider audience, and tech-savvy users can activate it early via the browser.profiles.enabled setting on the about:config page. Here's the step-by-step guide.
Enable New Profile Manager in Firefox
- Launch Firefox 138 on your computer.
- Access the about:config page: In the address bar, type
about:configand press Enter. You may see a warning message stating, “This might void your warranty!” or something similar. Click Accept the Risk and Continue to proceed.
- Now, in the search bar at the top of the about:config page, type: browser.profiles.enabled. This will filter the list and display the specific setting you need to modify.
- If the browser.profiles.enabled setting is not already set to true, double-click it to change its value to true, or click the button with two opposite arrows for that.
- If the setting doesn’t exist, right-click anywhere on the page, select New > Boolean , and create a new preference named browser.profiles.enabled with the value true.
- Finally, close and re-launch Firefox to apply the changes.
- Access the New Profile Manager: After restarting, open the main menu (three horizontal lines in the top-right corner). Click on the <profile name> option at the top of the menu.
- You can now manage profiles, create new ones etc, customizing the existing ones.
That's it!
Important Notes
The new profile manager does not interact with the old profile system launched via the command line (firefox --ProfileManager or firefox -P). Old profiles won’t appear in the new interface, and vice versa.
Profiles are stored in separate subdirectories under ~/.mozilla/firefox/ (on Linux/macOS) or C:\Users\<YourUsername>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ (on Windows).
By enabling the new profile manager, you gain access to a more intuitive and modern user interface to manage multiple browser sessions. This puts Firefox on pair with Chrome, which offers a similar profile manager for several years.
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