Bigger status

Testing customisations

Finding your profile

Preference files

Importing to Thunderbird

Junk mail

Firefox tips
Rose Vines' favourite tips for making the most of Firefox and Thunderbird

Finding your profile
Multiple users on the same computer can each have their own settings in Mozilla and Firefox. Those settings are stored as user profiles. Many of the settings you can change directly from within the browser using the various menus and options; advanced users can change thousands of other settings by directly editing preference files within the appropriate profile folder.

The first trick is locating your profile folder; both Mozilla and Firefox bury them away. To locate the default profile for Firefox in Windows XP or Win2k, it's: %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.xxx\ where xxx is a random string of three characters and %appdata% is your personal Application Data path. The easiest way to find the appdata path is to click Start —> Run, type %appdata% and click OK to open the folder. Then dig down through the Mozilla, Firefox folders, and so on, until you get to the appropriate profile folder. If you've created profiles for other users, they'll be named with a random string of characters followed by a full stop and the user's name, such as wsmkaii3.Rose.

In earlier versions of Windows you'll find the default profile in C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.xxx\. Mozilla stores the profile in Windows XP/2000 in: %appdata%\Mozilla\Profiles\username\xxxxxxxx.slt where username is your Mozilla user name and xxxxxxxx is a random string of eight characters. Under earlier versions of Windows, the Mozilla profiles are in: C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\username\xxxxxxxx.slt.