A FireFox Tip

This is a small Firefox tip that will come pretty handy. Say you have a lot of bookmarks, saved passwords, saved web page urls, lots of shortcuts in the Firefox window, installed extensions like StumbleUpon, UnPlug etc. This Firefox with all your surfing history is on your desktop system. You installed FireFox on your brand new laptop and now you want your laptop's FireFox to be configured exactly in the same way as your desktop. Now its pretty difficult to manually feed in the information to your new laptop. It could take hours (in my case days) and most of it is totally not transferrable. So, here is a way to get all the glamor from your desktop to your laptop with a few clicks a USB stick and no network connection.

1. Open the FireFox on your Desktop.

2. Click on Help -> Troubleshooting information.

3. This opens up another tabbed window displaying all the FireFox preferences and settings. Here under the Application Basics section, for the profile directory Click the Open Containing Folder button. If you observe the address bar you can see that this window can also be brought up by typing about:support in the address bar.

4. This will open an explorer window showing you the location where FireFox keeps all its important data. This information is the brains of FireFox. It will usually be found in C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[somecharacters].default directory.

5. Copy all the contents of this [somecharacters].default directory to your USB stick.

6. Open the FireFox on your laptop and this time open the support page by typing about:support in the address bar. 

7. Just like before click on Open Containing Folder to view the contents of that folder on your laptop.

8. As a safety means backup that data you see into a temporary folder somewhere else on your drive.

9. Shift + Delete the contents of that directory and Paste the contents of your USB Stick that you just copied from your desktop into this directory.

10. Close the window and restart FireFox.

11. If all the steps above were followed then bingo !! Your laptop's FireFox will be configured just like the FireFox on your desktop.

This technique can also be used to backup your entire FireFox in case of a new install or some other purpose..

Happy Surfing....