Easily Backup Mozilla Firefox “about:config” Settings

If you want to tweak Mozilla Firefox to the extreme, then about:config is where you will need to look out for the advanced settings. But tweaking about:config without any knowledge of what the settings does may be very harmful for Firefox’s health. So it would be a good idea if you keep a backup of about:config default settings. This backup will help you very much if anything goes out of your hands, so you can easily restore everything back to normal. Its also a good idea to keep a backup, if you have customized your Firefox to suit your needs using the about:config, so that you can easily have your customized settings back when Windows crashes and you are installing all your programs back.

Here is how you can easily backup the about:config settings and save yourself:

• First and formost, if Mozilla Firefox is running, exit it.
• Then click on the Start button and then click on Run…
• Type %appdata%mozillafirefoxprofiles and click on OK or press Enter.
• Windows Explorer window will open. In this window, you will see your Firefox profile folder viz. <some random characters>.default, e.g. l4aknmw.default.
• Open that folder. Now, in this folder search for a file called prefs.js. This is the file we are interested into as this is the one which contains the about:config settings.
• Back up this file to a safe location.
• Now you can safely try modifying your about:config settings and if you really mess up something or Firefox behaves odd, simply close down Firefox and copy the backup of prefs.js back to its original location.
• Your Firefox should come back to life!