Starting Firefox with a temporary profile

I have been starting Firefox with temporary throwaway profiles (for research and testing purposes), and wrote this to make it a little faster.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from os import path from subprocess import run from sys import argv from tempfile import TemporaryDirectory

Script to run Firefox with a temporary profile.

Takes one optional argument, URL to open.

Reference

kb.mozillazine.org/Bypassing_the_Profile_Manager

try: url = argv [ 1 ] except IndexError: url = "about:blank"

with TemporaryDirectory () as tmp: print ( "Starting Firefox with profile %s " % tmp )

Write a preferences file to turn off the first run pages

with open ( path. join ( tmp, "prefs.js" ), "w" ) as fh: print ( ''' user_pref("startup.homepage_welcome_url", ""); user_pref("datareporting.policy.dataSubmissionPolicyBypassNotification", true); user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "chrome://browser/content/blanktab.html"); user_pref("toolkit.telemetry.reportingpolicy.firstRun", false); user_pref("trailhead.firstrun.didSeeAboutWelcome", true); ''', file = fh )

Start Firefox using the fresh profile, with developer tools open

run ([ '/usr/bin/firefox', '--devtools', '-profile', tmp, url ])

Based on the article Bypassing the Profile Manager from MozillaZine. This is the “unlisted profile” feature.

And the temporary profile directory gets cleaned up when the script exits.

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