Hi Mark:

I want to start by saying a Firefox profile and a Firefox account are not the same thing. (I assume by "user account" you meant Firefox account and not Windows/Microsoft account. My comments would be completely different for a Windows/Microsoft account.)

A Firefox profile is a folder full of settings files.

A Firefox account is an account you use to access various Mozilla services (Access Mozilla Services with a Firefox Account).

You can keep the same profile and change Firefox accounts.

You can use the same Firefox account in multiple profiles (that's how Sync works).

So my first question is, did you already or do you really need to create a new Firefox profile? A new Firefox profile would look like a factory fresh installation with none of your existing data. You typically would have followed the steps in this help article: Profile Manager - Create, remove or switch Firefox profiles. (Important: do not delete old profiles until you make a backup, because it's a little to easy to delete the wrong one.)

Where are you in the process and where do you want to end up?

As mentioned above, I created a new profile because I have a new email address, which according to Firefox, is the user name for a profile and cannot be changed. I figured out on my own to move certain items from the folder containing the old profile to the folder containing the new profile. So now I have all of my bookmarks and folders in the new profile as well as add-ons, extensions, etc.

I do not see the difference between a profile and a user account since when creating the new profile I had to attach a different user name (my new email address) and a new password. I do not see how you can have different profiles with the same account when each profile needs a different user name (different email address) and a different password.

I've been telling him that here; How do I create a new Firefox account? https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1143237

Probably you found an article like this: Recover important data from an old profile.

Mark In Lincoln said

I do not see the difference between a profile and a user account since when creating the new profile I had to attach a different user name (my new email address) and a new password. I do not see how you can have different profiles with the same account when each profile needs a different user name (different email address) and a different password.

Firefox accounts are optional. If you don't create a Firefox account and set up Sync, your data is just stored locally like it has been since the dawn of browser time.

When you install Firefox or create a new Firefox profile, Firefox encourages you to create or connect to a Firefox account. If you want to Sync the data from your existing Firefox account, don't create a new one, just connect to the old one. In the attached screenshot, you'll notice that at the bottom of the form area of the page.

In your case, since you wanted to create a new Firefox account, what you did was probably only a little less efficient than disconnecting your old profile from your old Firefox account and then connecting your old profile to a new Firefox account.

No, I did not want to create a new Firefox account. Initially all I wanted to do was to change my email address. I couldn't do that because the email address is permanently attached to a profile as the user name. So to reemphasize, I had to created a new profile with my new email address.

Now, according to your latest comment, I need to create a new "account" so I can sync my new profile to my other computer? (My other computer is currently synced with my old profile, presumably with some existing account).

It's the other way around. Your Firefox account is permanently associated with one email address, so since you wanted to use a new address, you needed to create a new Firefox account. Firefox profiles do not have user names, but you can associate them with a Firefox account.

Anyway, it sounds as though you have BOTH a new profile AND a new Firefox account and you are done.