Switching Between Seperate Firefox Accounts
My brother and I have separate Firefox accounts. He stays with me a lot for weeks or even months at a time. He's not an avid smart phone user. He prefers a desktop PC just as I do. The big problem is we can't switch accounts. All his passwords and web sites are linked to his account, the same as mine is to mine. If I log out of my Firefox and he attempts to log into his, we get a warning that all synced items will be merged. We end up not switching. This is very frustrating for him since he doesn't remember his sign-in's. He relies on his Firefox account for that. Is there any way around this? We can do it with Google and his AOL accounts. Anybody have any ideas?
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A Firefox Account is not the same as other accounts (like Google or AOL) because it's more than just logging in for access. A Firefox Account will actually save the contents of the account to your computer, which is why it gets merged.
Just to clarify, I'll be referring to two different things in this post that kind of share similar names. The Firefox Account is the service that you are logging in on to get your information on your account. The Firefox profile is the folder on your computer where all of the Firefox settings are saved. These are two different things, so it's important not to get them mixed up.
What you want in your situation is to create a second Firefox profile on your computer. This will be the folder where all of your brother's settings and data are saved. Anything that's done in your brother's Firefox profile will not have any impact on your Firefox profile and vice versa.
When you have a second profile set up, your brother can log into the Firefox Account on that profile and it will put his data in there. Because profiles are separate, the data that comes from the Firefox Account won't be merged when the data that you already have on your own Firefox profile.
You can use Firefox's builtin Profile Manager to add new profiles to your computer and it's what you will use to change between the two profiles. See the Profile Manager - Create, remove or switch Firefox profiles page for more information on using the Profile Manager.
Hope this helps.
It might cause inconvenience with other software, but I just want to add a footnote that you could consider having two Windows user accounts. Firefox should automatically keeps the profiles of each different Windows user separate, and you'd each have your own desktop.