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raulricardo21
Asked: 2011-10-30 22:40:18 +0800 CST

Which is the best way to version a lot firefox's profiles?. git, dropbox/ubuntuone or better option

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my case is the following, I want to find the best way to have as many firefox's profiles as I want. I used to solve this problem with firefox sync before they limit the number of account per mail. I reach 7 profile with the same email account but right now that is not possible anymore, so I was thinking in option like this

  • Firefox sync as I say limit the number of accounts by email, but it'll perfect if mozilla's people allow it again. Personal server, may be the best option, but my actual hosting doesn't support mercurial and I have no experience with it.
  • Using dropbox/ubuntuone sync could be a nice way, but I'm not sure about security, and eventually will represent a expense that I can not afford.
  • With git I think could be pretty useful, at least in theory because I can use it for different distro/different versions of firefox, even merge/branch on external HD. But I dont know if is handy to do.

I like your opinion over my personal limitation about server, knowledge, finance. Perhaps, with your ideas I can find another solution that fit my case.

Thank you all in advance.

P.D, maybe it is obvious, but it is important that any solution involves ubuntu, that why I asking here, at least ubuntu-based distrosa little bit of git on firefox, but so far it is not going so well, because many files are created once you run a profile, and other are deleted once close it. So I find this underestimate

firefox

3 Answers

  1. as was posted in an edit to your question

    Ok, new approach. I underestimate the process of firefox, because I was focus on sync server, so I found this link and statrt to wonder which of those files should I version to get the same functionality of firefox sync?.. so if no other options comes to solve this problem, perhaps this approach do the trick.

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  2. It sounds that you actually want to have multiple Firefox profiles and not version them right? In that case, consider the use of Firefox profiles.

    Start the Profile Manager (add the -no-remote option if you've already a Firefox instance running):

    firefox -ProfileManager

    From there, you can add and remove Firefox profiles and set the default one. You can run multiple Firefox instances next to each other by adding the -no-remote option like this:

    firefox -no-remote -P default

    Here, default is the profile name which corespondents to the ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default directory. If you want to start a profile which is not known to Firefox (i.e. not mentioned in ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini), use:

    firefox -no-remote -profile /media/EXTERNAL/firefox-profile
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  3. Firefox profile directories are a pain (if not impossible) to version, mostly SQLITE and JSON (main formats used to store data), are not handy with Git (though you can tweak in order to diff them).

    The extension's directory, including big XML files are not better.

    The config.js is often cluttered with 2k-long directives coming from extensions and automagic timestamps.

    AFAICT Firefox is the most problematic application WRT to home-versioning.

    If you add varying extension-paths & versions (distribution/home-variable) and core file format variations along with Firefox upgrades into the picture, then it becomes very hard to track.

    I was never able to version correctly a couple of profiles between Debian and Gentoo.

    So actually nothing stops you to version Firefox profiles, but you'll fight to diff most files and never expect a merge to succeed for anything else than the user.js file.

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