Recreating My Firefox Profile

With the release of Firefox 5 a few days ago, I thought it was time to recreate my Firefox profile. You may not know what it is because you only have one: it’s the set of your add-ons, bookmarks, history, and every other kind of customization you can do to Firefox.

As a web developer, I have a half-dozen for testing reasons, but one that I use for all of my personal browsing and most of my work. Very infrequently, I’ve noticed that it sometimes would have errors on web pages that other Firefox profiles didn’t. After some thinking, I realized that I’ve been copying the same Firefox profile nearly ten years, copying it between computers as I upgrade. And all the while I’ve been tinkering with it, poking around in its config files, testing extensions, changing options in about:config.

I wanted a fairly mindless activity today, so I recreated my profile from scratch, re-installing all my extensions and configuring everything just the way I like it. It took a few hours, and my notes ended up surprisingly long.

The few times I’ve thought about switching to Chrome I’ve looked for one or two of these add-ons and seen that there’s no equivalent. Now that I have these notes I can check comprehensively the next time I get the urge.

The notes will mostly be of interest to web developers. My browser is pretty heavily customized with tools, privacy protections, and productivity tweaks (mostly to make it feel like vim and allow me to pull things offline easily). It’s an intimidating list to look at, but it’s ten years of small changes every few weeks all at once.

Add-Ons

Incompatible

These aren’t yet compatible with Firefox 5, so they didn’t get into my notes.

GreaseMonkey Scripts

Sorry for the lack of titles, but this was annoying enough to compile already.

51281 62706 7705 23555 53547 60314 38516 31804 56690 100746 104489 38985 45032 75263 77801 94112 30646 23175 28374 29279 29682 29681 29829 29828 95298 29666 49366 74340 76300 45032

Toolbars

Cookies

click on CookieMonster at bottom of window, click View Cookies, show exceptions.
‘Allow’ sites you regularly visit
‘Block’ google properties

Bookmarks menu -> Show all Bookmarks

‘Import and Backup’ -> Back up to json in old profile, Import ‘Choose File’ in new Same with ScrapBook - open sidebar, Tools, Import / Export, select all...

Edit -> Preferences

about:config

~/.mozilla/firefox/[profile]/chrome

userChrome.css

@namespace url(“http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul”);

/* don’t bold active tab title */ /* no longer works, argh */ tab[selected=”true”] { font-weight: normal !important; }

/* stop TreeStyleTab’s Sidebar theme from changing its color when in/active */ .tabbrowser-strip[treestyletab-style=”sidebar”][treestyletab-mode=”vertical”] { background-color: #ccc !important; }

userContent.css

` /* indicate nofollow links with a dotted blue underline */ a[rel~=nofollow] { border-bottom: 1px dotted blue !important; } `{lang=”javascript”}

Got any neat suggestions I’ve missed?