setting option of "View Online" for specific Firefox profile

weerawongphrom

I've been using multiple Firefox profiles. Each one has its own Zotero database. When I "View Online," the document was viewed within that profile. Now that Zotero become standalone, how do I choose specific Firefox profile to open the document?

adamsmith

You can't do that, but I'm not 100% sure I understand why that's necessary?

Gracile

You can run different instances of Zotero, but be very careful (backups…). You need to launch the profile manager : zotero.exe -p or zotero.exe -p "profilename"
And to run them at the same time, add -no-remote after the profile name : zotero.exe -p "profilename" -no-remote

That can be a bit tricky the first time because in Zotero 5.0 the Zotero data directory is not anymore in a "zotero" subfolder of the profile directory and Zotero 5.0 will try to migrate it from its old location.
5.0 changelog says:

New default data directory location

Files are now stored in a 'Zotero' directory in the user's home directory
A data directory in the previous default location within the Zotero or Firefox profile directory will be automatically moved to the new location
The new location allows PDFs and other files to be searched via Spotlight on macOS and restores the ability for PDFs to be annotated in-place via Preview on macOS Sierra
Future versions of Zotero will simplify the structure of the data directory for easier browsing from the filesystem

adamsmith

right -- that works for different data profiles in Standalone. I understood the question as asking how to set up view Online to open in different browser profiles. I don't see how that's possible (but also don't understand why it could be important)

weerawongphrom

@Gracile Thank you very much for the trick. Multiple Zotero profile is the point that I planned to solve in a few days, after I fix this current workflow problem.

@adamsmith Thank you for your answer. It saves time to know that something is not possible.
The reason that I want to view online with specific Firefox profile is about my data management. I used to have Firefox profile with different Zotero. I have one Zotero for referable material, like peer-reviewed papers. This one is small and is backed up regularly. I have another Zotero for everyday work, which is much larger and is rarely backed up. I set up multiple Zotero databases using multiple Firefox profiles. Subsequently, each Firefox profile is customized, both in functionality and the way they look and feel. So, multiple profile is important for me.
Right now, Zotero will use default Firefox profile to view item online. I just hope that there might be some lines that can change this behavior.

dstillman

Yeah, there's no way to do what you're asking currently, because Zotero just launches the URL via the OS, not in a specific browser.

Presumably you have the same problem opening links from any program on your system though, right? Just less of an issue in other programs, because they're not grouped together to begin with?

dstillman

I don't really see us working on this, but someone could probably write a Zotero plugin that overrode the URL-launching with a command line that you could customize to specify a specific profile. (Opening a URL from command line into a given profile that may or may not already be running might be tricky on different platforms. Probably works even if it's running with firefox.exe -p on Windows, but you'd need to do something different on macOS, which handles the process differently.)