What are there different profiles? Why is "default" not the default?
Today I stumbled on an issue that seems to have affected a number of users who care about profiles. The issue is articulated well here. It appears that a clean installation of Firefox results in the creation of two profiles, one called "default-release" and another "default" where "default-release" is the default. Ugh.
Can any user safely delete the "default" profile and rename the "default-release" profile to "default" to restore a simple, uncomplicated configuration? Why wouldn't Firefox do this by default?
I understand from question 1264072 that Firefox did this intentionally to support multiple installs and release channels, but why shouldn't the "default" profile be used by default? Surely a user who is not performing multiple installs or dealing with multiple release channels shouldn't have their profile names polluted by unaffected concerns.
All Replies (3)
Hmm, I don't think Firefox 67 and later would have a reason to create a "default" profile. Could that be from an earlier installation?
Jason R. Coombs said
Can any user safely delete the "default" profile and rename the "default-release" profile to "default" to restore a simple, uncomplicated configuration? Why wouldn't Firefox do this by default?
You can remove unwanted profiles. Due to some hardcoded paths in a profile folder, it's better not to change the name.
To remove unwanted profiles:
Inside Firefox, type or paste about:profiles in the address bar and press Enter/Return to load it.
The profile that Firefox is currently using will have this:
This is the profile in use and it cannot be deleted.
If you want to make a different profile your default so you can delete this one, you'll need to make the change and then restart Firefox to release the folder lock before returning to this page.
All profiles NOT in use will have a Remove button. When you click Remove, you should be given the option to also remove the files from disk (if you don't, the folder will remain but be removed from the index files Firefox uses to build the about:profiles page.)
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer said
Hmm, I don't think Firefox 67 and later would have a reason to create a "default" profile. Could that be from an earlier installation?
It's not. On my macOS machine where this occurred, I installed Firefox myself onto the machine that was factory new in January of this year. Separately, in this comment, the user reported a new installation on Ubuntu with the same behavior (two profiles in a new install).
You can remove unwanted profiles. Due to some hardcoded paths in a profile folder, it's better not to change the name.
I ended up removing 'default' and renaming 'default-release' to 'default'. I hope that doesn't come to bite me. Probably the UI shouldn't offer a rename function if it's known to be unsafe.
Moreover, Firefox should figure out why it's providing this clunky interface (default name with irrelevant concerns, multiple profiles by default).
There are several Firefox versions each with its own update channel and each use their own profile folder that have a name like xxxxxxxx.default-<update-channel>, where update-channel can be 'release' or 'esr' or 'beta' or 'nightly'. Only the Developer Edition has another name as the version already used its ow xxxxxxxx.dev-edition-default profile for a lot longer time.
You shouldn't rename a profile folder on the hard drive and there is also a secondary profile in "AppData\Local".