If you got a new PC or laptop, you could easily move your Firefox profile data to your new computer. All you need is to copy and paste profile directory files to the new computer.

There are tools to backup and restore the profile data, or synchronize your profile among different devices but you can to do it manually if what you need is to permanently move your profile data to the new PC.

Where is My Firefox Profile Folder?

First, let’s find where your Firefox profile data is.

The location of Firefox profile folder in Windows XP or Windows 2000:

“C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles”

Or if you are using Windows Vista, Windows 7 or 8, you can find it here;

“C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles”

Don’t forget to change the “username” with your windows username.

You will find a directory in the format of “XXXXXXXX.default”, which is your Firefox profile folder. XXXXXXXX is a random string of 8 characters.

If you can’t locate your profile folder, check out this link for a more detailed explanation.

Copy Your Profile Data

Now, copy the directory, “XXXXXXXX.default”, to a flash drive, dropbox, google drive or wherever you could access it from your new computer.

Paste Your Profile Data

Go to the directory where your firefox profile exists on your new PC.

Double click to browse your “XXXXXXXX.default” on your new PC. Delete all the contents of this directory.

Paste the contents of the profile directory from your previous PC to this directory

You should be able to see all the bookmarks, extensions, themes, passwords, preferences, cookies from your last machine on your new PC.

I read a couple days ago that search engines may fetch both www and non-www versions of a domain as separate domains if  redirection is done by using CNAME.  What this means is that you have exactly the same content on two different domains, www and non-www versions of the same domain. This might have negative effects on your rankings on google and other search engines.

So what is the solution? You need to redirect www to non-www or non-www to www version using the http 301 redirection in the htaccess file.

Here is the code for redirecting www to non-www.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://%1/$1 [R=301,NE,L]

or you can hardcode your URL if you prefer to.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirecting from Non-WWW to WWW

If you want to redirect from non-www to www, you may try the following code in your htaccess file.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ![0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.
RewriteRule !"" http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L,NC]

By the way, don’t forget to include the following directive in your htaccess before adding the above codes.

 RewriteEngine On