You have a lot of flexibility when you use Profiles with ExBrowser Plugin. You can add custom plugins and individual configurations, that you can use for many different things.
Hello. Good morning, everyone. Today I would like to talk about Firefox extensions and Firefox profiles quickly with you guys. There is currently a limitation to load Firefox extensions with ExBrowser plugin. This is because Firefox changed a couple of things within move the browser, and that requires certain updates to the plugin and to some of the libraries that are used in the ExBrowser plugin. And unfortunately those libraries are not yet available as a production release. So there is an alpha build that I’m currently testing with, but the current stage, I don’t want to add that to ExBrowser plugin, because as an alpha built, I’m not sure how robust that currently is, so that’s why I still stay away from that.
But you can still run extensions and plugins with Firefox, but you have to create a custom profile and add the extension to that profile. And there’s a little modification you have to do as well. So how do you create a custom profile? You run Firefox EXE with the minus P option on your local system, right? Locally installed Firefox browser, right? If you don’t have that you, you have to run that or install that to create that profile first. So you can’t use the portable browser. I mean, you probably can also execute that with minus P, but yeah, I have the full Firefox installed here on my system. So you run that. It will show the profile management dialogue from Firefox, and you create a new profile here, and then you select the folder where you want that profile to be stored, right? If you hover your mouse over it, you will see that.
So then you launch Firefox with that profile. Now let’s do that quickly. And as you can see, it will fire up the browser, and it already has an extension installed because I did that before. Here’s the Privacy Badger installed, just picked a random one that showed up. Doesn’t really matter for the test here. So this one is now installed into that profile. So you can close the local browser now. Now, in ExBrowser plugin. You just specify that profile name with that folder, and then you can run that, and it will launch the browser and load that profile. So keep an eye on the extension sign, you see it? It showed up and then the icon moved away from that bar. So when you look at the extensions or the add ons here, it’s still there and it’s still enabled. If you disable it and enable it again, the icon will show up here. So if you run it again, then the same thing will happen. The icon disappears for some strange reason. But I will show you how to fix that in a second.
Also, another thing, please keep in mind with Firefox, and I covered that in that other Firefox profile video in my YouTube channel a while ago, it’s a difference how Firefox uses profile. So with Chrome, profiles, profile directory are loaded and used. So changes you make in ExBrowser Chrome, in a cover, and you load a custom profile, they will be stored in that profile. So if you add an extension in Chrome then it will stay there. With Firefox and ExBrowser plugin, that’s not the case, because when ExBrowser uses Firefox, that specified profile directory that we have specified here is copied to a temporary location. And everything you do, so if you add more stuff here now, it will not copy that back to that profile folder. So anytime you want to make modifications to that profile that you use here, you have to run your local Firefox instance and not launch it via ExBrowser plugin. So because of multithreading and some other internal things, the profile is copied to a temporary location.
So that’s also the reason why we have that copy Firefox profile command here, that you can then use to copy back some stuff, and it’s not copying the whole temporary folder and you have to execute it before the browser is closed, if you want to save cookies, for example. So there are certain things that are copied back then, and the way you do that, you just specify the load directory, the profile directory again, and that copy Firefox profile command. But that’s covered in that other tutorial if you want more detail.
So what this does, it’s just copying some files, and that’s copying, if I remember correctly, cookies and some of the caching stuff, and favorites and things like that. But not the whole profile, because not possible, because while it’s still, and you have to execute that while that browser instance is still running. So don’t execute it after clean up or close, doesn’t work. Then it will copy that stuff back to the destination for us, so next time you load it, the stuff will be there. But that was just an additional info for you. This is not needed here. And it’s not copying the extension. So this does not work.
So if you want to modify the profile and add additional extensions, you cannot add them when you execute the Firefox browser via ExBrowser Launcher. You have to modify that with, as I showed you, run Firefox.exe -P. And then load that profile, then modify it, and then close the browser. And then the profile has the new settings, and then you can load it with ExBrowser plugin.
So that being said, now let’s take a look how we can fix that Privacy Badger thing. I have a post about that on the website as well, it’s called ExBrowser Firefox Custom Profiles and Plugins. And here it’s explained that you have to open that press GS file within that Firefox profile directory. And we are in that profile directory now. So here’s the press GS file. You open that, edit it with Notepad++. And now let’s have a quick look. You will find that line, delete that line. Extension last build. Let’s find that. So here it is. We delete that line? Save it. And then we can now launch the brwoser. We will load the profile. And as you can see now it has the extension loaded and also showing up the correct batch here.
So that’s it for today. Thanks a lot. Have a nice day.
