Firefox Profile Location on an Apple OS X System

The Firefox web browser stores information about its user settings and state in a "profile" directory for each user. On a Mac OS X system (now macOS), such as my MacBook Pro laptop, you can have Firefox open a Finder window showing you the relevant profile folder or you can find it from a command line interface (CLI), i.e., a shell prompt, by opening a Terminal window (you can find the Terminal program in the Applications/Utilities folder). For the latter method, you can see the location of the profile directory by issing the command ls -l ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles. (you need to put a backslash before the space in the directory path)

$ ls -l ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles
total 0
drwx------  53 jasmith1  ABC\Domain Users  1802 Jan 23 11:56 bgq13udo.default
$

Within that directory, you will see files such as the following ones:

$ ls ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/bgq13udo.default/
SiteSecurityServiceState.txt	key3.db
addons.json			localstore.rdf
blocklist.xml			logins.json
bookmarkbackups			mimeTypes.rdf
cert8.db			minidumps
cert_override.txt		permissions.sqlite
compatibility.ini		places.sqlite
content-prefs.sqlite		places.sqlite-shm
cookies.sqlite			places.sqlite-wal
cookies.sqlite-shm		pluginreg.dat
cookies.sqlite-wal		prefs.js
crashes				revocations.txt
datareporting			saved-telemetry-pings
evernote_native.bin		search.json
extensions			search.json.mozlz4
extensions.ini			secmod.db
extensions.json			sessionCheckpoints.json
formhistory.sqlite		sessionstore-backups
gmp				storage
gmp-gmpopenh264			times.json
healthreport			webapps
healthreport.sqlite		webappsstore.sqlite
healthreport.sqlite-shm		webappsstore.sqlite-shm
healthreport.sqlite-wal		webappsstore.sqlite-wal
jetpack				xulstore.json
$

Alternatively, the steps below can be used to open that profile folder from within the Firefox browser itself.

  1. Click on the menu button, which is 3 short horizontal bars at the top, right-hand corner of the Firefox window, i.e., Firefox menu button, then click on the question mark, i.e., Firefox question mark, which appears at the bottom of the menu to the right of "Customize", to open the help menu.
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    Firefox menu

  2. Select Troubleshooting Information.

    Firefox - Troubleshooting information

  3. Under the Applications Basic section, click on the Show in Finder button which appears to the right of Profile Folder.

    Firefox profile show in finder

You will then see a Finder window showing the contents of the Firefox profile folder.

Finder - profile directory

Note: the steps and screen shots above are for Firefox ESR 45.6.0 on an OS X system, but should be similar for other versions of Firefox, at least versions of Firefox close in time to this version.