Discover Where your Firefox Profile Directory is.

I've often had the challenge of knowing "Which profile am I running? Where is it loaded from ? " with firebox. Especially on Windows, where there is a dizzying maze of inconsistency, which only seems to be getting worse. Thankfully, Firefox 4.0 ( and possibly earlier ) has a solution of sorts.

about:support

This helpful dialogue summarises a whole bunch of useful things that are probably cause for your woes.

However, they've done one thing, well meaning, but completely stupid in my estimation.

Now to me, this is a big problem, because mostly, I've had a common issue with anything "open a directory" related simply not work, and for me, it would be much much more practical if it just told me where it is ( this also really gets on my goat with the download manager, because open pretty almost never works as expected , especially as directories, and I just wish it would tell me where the damned file is instead of making me do a dance ).

So, I got busy and poked around in the guts of about:support with firebug, and found the source code for that button in chrome://. As a result, here is a nice little scriptlet that will tell you where that location is without needing to open some external application!

javascript:alert(Services.dirsvc.get("ProfD", Ci.nsIFile).path);

When you are on the about:support page, copy and paste that string as-is into your address bar and press enter, if you are lucky, you'll get an alert box telling you where to look

Hopefully, this technique will help out where others fail ( Such as the one odd incident I saw on IRC today where the user has rm -r ~/.mozilla but they still somehow have Firefox remembering what their profile looks like.