Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Profile Warning, Profile Changes

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by BevHoward

BevHoward
BevHoward
more options

(fwiw, ff just discarded about half an hours work in composing this query forcing me to start again from scratch... is this a secret plan to force users to Chrome and Edge? ...very very frustrated, both by the problem below and the fragility of composing help messages)

My wife and I have ff logins, we sync and we both frequently switch to each other's profiles to share, ask questions, help, etc. We have been doing this for years, but, today, ff decided to make life miserable for both of us for no apparent reason, without warning and with zero information about how to deal with it... both in ff and on this help/community forum.

Two things happened today... first, the profile chooser displayed the names "default...something" and "default" instead of our profile names.

Both of these new profiles went to my profile and not my wife's. There is no apparent way to "switch profiles"

When I tried to log out and log in with her login, I received the warning that all of my profile information (a lot) would be permanently discarded and lost if I proceeded ...so, I stopped.

How do I add her profile to this computer without loosing all of my account data?

I note that you do not even have profiles as a problem topic and the info that is on this site does not discuss anything other than creating a new profile.

Beverly Howard

(fwiw, ff just discarded about half an hours work in composing this query forcing me to start again from scratch... is this a secret plan to force users to Chrome and Edge? ...very very frustrated, both by the problem below and the fragility of composing help messages) My wife and I have ff logins, we sync and we both frequently switch to each other's profiles to share, ask questions, help, etc. We have been doing this for years, but, today, ff decided to make life miserable for both of us for no apparent reason, without warning and with zero information about how to deal with it... both in ff and on this help/community forum. Two things happened today... first, the profile chooser displayed the names "default...something" and "default" instead of our profile names. Both of these new profiles went to my profile and not my wife's. There is no apparent way to "switch profiles" When I tried to log out and log in with her login, I received the warning that all of my profile information (a lot) would be permanently discarded and lost if I proceeded ...so, I stopped. How do I add her profile to this computer without loosing all of my account data? I note that you do not even have profiles as a problem topic and the info that is on this site does not discuss anything other than creating a new profile. Beverly Howard

All Replies (2)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

Note that best is to create two Firefox desktop shortcuts that each specify the profile you want to use (add a space and "-P profile1" and "-P profile2" to the target line; names as shown in the Profile Manager).

Sounds that you either switched to a new profile or otherwise lost data.

You will have to create a new profile for your wife if both profiles you currently have point to your profiles.

BevHoward
BevHoward Question owner
more options

Thanks... the second link did the trick. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch...

I'm going to have to spend some time wrapping my head around that to try to understand the philosophy of that process.

For anyone else with the same need, it dawns that "creating a new profile" essentially creates a new firefox session that is not logged in when it is started... when that session is launched and then signed in with a different ff user login, the new profile is then associated with the second login but the original data is retained when that profile is selected again.

The confuser is that if a profile is logged in by one ff user and the user then signs out, and a different login is used to sign in to the same profile, that is what trashes the original users data and information.

Thanks again, Beverly Howard