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Is there a way to have different taskbar icons for two different Firefox profiles? I have two shortcuts which point to bat scripts which launch Firefox profiles in following manner:

start "" "D:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe" -no-remote -P "default"

It's easy to change icons for shortcuts which sit on desktop, but when I launch Firefox instances they both have the same standard icon.

edit

related problems:

It seems there's no good, consistently working solution at this moment (2011-08-20).

fixer1234
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chodorowicz
  • 271

5 Answers5

2

If somebody is OK with running beta version of FF (or Aurora or Nightly) then installing and using stable with one profile and beta with the other one seems to solve the problem.

  • it's possible to pin both profiles to taskbar
  • these profiles can have different icons

How to do it:

  1. Install stable version of FF and beta version in separate folders (you can get beta from here)
  2. Create second profile using ProfileManager
  3. Add to the beta shortut target parameter -no-remote -p yourprofilename
  4. Change the icon simply by rightclicking on the pinned icon, rightclicking properties and the icon menu item

It seems to works flawlessly. If somebody has a way to run two stable versions in this manner I'll gladly accept such an answer.

chodorowicz
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1
  1. Right click on Taskbar launcher for which you want to change the icon.
  2. Right click on the task list item with the Program name (eg. "Mozilla Firefox")
  3. Click on Properties.

You can change the launcher icon in this property dialog. You may have to restart explorer or logout/login for the changes to take effect.

Nithin Philips
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I struggled with this for a long time, but finally found solutions.

According to users, this Reddit post solved it for many users, but that's not what I used. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/s2k5tt/have_multiple_firefox_profile_and_taskbar_icons/?rdt=63276

Kenny's answer (just above mine, atm) looks quite interesting too, and I'd advise checking it.

Anyway, here's what I personally did, and wanted to share in case it may help :

  • Create a 256*256 image (Googled what I need, edited with Gimp...)

  • Create a custom icon using https://icoconvert.com/ I selected "custom sizes / multi size in one icon" and created a single icon file with all four 16x16, 32x32, 48x48 & 256x256 sized icons from the image I wanted to use.

  • Then, to use it in FF, I went to Firefox's directory, created some copies of the exe, and changed the icons in copies using Resource Hacker (found on Wikihow, probably here). It's safe, but we're on Internet, so I'd advise you to check it with Virustotal anyway ! Operation was really simple. Just open the exe, go look for the "icon groups" and replace the icon in groups 32512 (taskbar icon) and 1 (file explorer icon). One right click... Then save it (You should always work on copies, but resource hacker will also make a backup file for you).

Once you have as many different customized exes as you need for your sessions, just use usual shortcuts and launch them with "path-to-FF-exe.exe" -no-remote -P <yourProfileName> as you would usually do for using several session.

I assume a limitation of this technique is it may get messed-up by auto updates (I didn't test it), but I've been disabling them and updating manually at pretty long intervals for quite some time now.
Also, at the time I write this, I can't go past FF ESR 115 on Win7, so updates are definitely not an issue.
Maybe resource hacker has a silent mode which could allow automating this too ?
Anyway, if you care about this, the Reddit I posted above or Kenny's answer might be more suited to your needs. I just wish I found something like this before, and prefer sharing it anyway. (I Looked for this several times in the past and never found a solution until today)

Balmipour
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The solution is very easy.

go to about:config in firefox

change or create the boolean setting taskbar.grouping.useprofile to true

then change or create the boolean setting browser.startup.blankWindow to false

then open about:profiles start the second profile you want to pin.

that profile will now open with a new taskbar icon. You will be able to pin this icon. Once the icon is pinned, it becomes a shortcut.

Then right click the shortcut that is pinned in the taskbar, in this menu, right click Firefox (1)
*note each addition pin will create Firefox (x) .... so if this is your 4th profile, then the shortcut will show Firefox (4)

Go to properties. in the target add -no-remote -P "name_of_second_profile" at the end. I also change the icon at this stage, to something else, so I know what profile is what.

Luke Attard
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I found a Firefox extension which sets the AppID based on the profile name. This will allow different profiles to appear under different icons on the Windows 7 taskbar. It is available here: http://code.google.com/p/win7appid/issues/detail?id=3#c0

Within the discussion, there's a link to download the "win7appid-ff4-profile.zip" zip file, which should be extracted to your Firefox Extensions folder.

There's also an updated script for FF5 and later, in comment 8 of the discussion. This should be pasted into the following file, overwriting the existing code: components\win7appid.js

Note that I haven't been able to choose different icons for each profile - they show on the taskbar as the standard Firefox icon.

Kenny
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