As a moonlighting web designer I go back and forth between browsers often. Firefox is a mainstay in my design workflow not only because of the valuable development extensions available for the platform, but because many of my clients use Firefox over Safari as their browser of choice. As I am working I tend to keep a handful of tabs open displaying various states of my current project. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could leave the office, and pick up my browsing environment right where I left off from home? By telling Firefox to save my profile into my Dropbox folder instead of my Library folder I can keep my Firefox browsing sessions in sync across multiple computers.

1. I start by copying my existing Firefox Application Support Directory from ‘~/Library/Application Support/Firefox’ to ‘~/Dropbox/Firefox’.
2. I then start Firefox from the command line using the following command ‘/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -profilemanager’.
3. Next I delete my Default User profile from the dialog window that appears.
4. I then create a new profile named Dropbox User, and choose the folder where it will be located by selecting ‘~/Dropbox/Firefox/Profiles/######’ where ###### = the random hash of my previously copied profile.
5. Once this preference has been applied I can start Firefox normally without the use of the command line.
6. By repeating steps 2 through 5 of this process for all of my Dropbox enabled computers I can share the same Firefox profile where ever I go.

By establishing Firefox syncing through Dropbox I not only synchronize my Firefox browsing session between multiple computers, but my bookmarks, history, cache, extensions and themes as well. My only word of caution for this setup is not to browse on Firefox using two synchronized computers at the same time. For best results I always quit Firefox on one computer before moving to the next.