March 05,
2006
Firefox Essentials:
Get To Know Your Profile
Delve
Inside
Page 2 of
5
Delve Inside
So much for the outside; what's on the inside
of your profile folder? Among other things,
you'll find files dealing with:
-
Where you've been: Besides
your bookmarks.html and
history.dat
files, you'll find the data required to
auto-fill online forms (formhistory.dat); your
saved site login names (signons.txt),
passwords (key.db), and security
certificates (cert8.db); and a cookie.txt file that
helps Web sites to "remember" you from visit
to visit.
-
What you do: When you
install one of the hundreds of small Firefox
helper apps known as extensions, it lands in
a separate folder within your profile -- this
allows every user on a system to keep his or
her own set of extensions, rather than
sharing a single, common set. The same is
true of Firefox search-engine plugins, which
also get their own profile folder.
-
What you see: You might
already know about the Firefox prefs.js file, which
provides access to a variety of
under-the-hood configuration settings (to see
the same settings, you can also type about:config in
the browser's address box); and the user.js file, which
allows power users to customize things like
menu items, typefaces, and font sizes.
-
The
prefs.js file controls scads of
configuration settings.
Click image to enlarge
and to launch image
gallery.
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In the Chrome folder, you'll find two more
text files (complete with examples and
sample scripts) where you can customize the
Firefox toolbars, icons, buttons, and other
"look and feel" elements.
The
userChrome.css file lets you
customize the browser's look and
feel.
Click image to enlarge
and to launch image
gallery.
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Other files may also appear in your profile
folder, depending mostly upon what types of
extensions you install; as I'll discuss
shortly, these obscure and usually harmless
files can, when corrupted or
misconfigured, wreak havoc over your
profile -- sometimes to the point of
rendering it unusable.
Unless you're a developer or a power user,
the best way to "manage" your profile data
is to leave it alone. When you install and
start up Firefox for the first time, it
automatically creates a default profile for
you; if Firefox finds more than one user
account on your PC, then each user gets his
or her own default profile when they start
up the browser for the first time. If you
delete or move your profile, Firefox will
simply create a new one -- unless you tell
it otherwise.
As a rule, one profile is all you need:
Only software developers and hard-core
power users bother to create or manage
multiple profiles for the same version of
Firefox on the same system.
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