Is It Possible To Run Two Copies Of Firefox On Different Settings?

shadowx

Jun 29 2007, 03:09 PM

Hi everyone, this is hard to explain..Basically i use firefox for browsing and i like the way ive got it set up, but now im ging into web development more i need the development addons for FF. The problem is i dont want to have millions of addons on my normal FF browser as it gets clogged up in the toolbars etc and would annoy me. So i thought i would get another download of FF and use that and add all the usefull Dev addons i could find, the problem is both FF exe's use the same settings, probably from the same registry entry, if i clear history in one, it gets cleared in the other so if i install addons in one of the browsers they will all be there in the other which defeats the object.

So my question is, is it possible to have to firefox EXE's both running with different settings? This way i can have one for development and one for browsing, any ideas? Im not really into editing the registry as i dont trust myself, ive done it before but i dont like doing it.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

Tetraca

Jun 29 2007, 03:45 PM

You can. What you need to do is setup two accounts. The extensions for each account should be seperate from one another.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

jlhaslip

Jun 29 2007, 04:57 PM

I think with two 'profiles' you can affect the operation of Firefox. Simply switch profiles to do web development with all the extensions and revert back to another profile without the extensions.

there is also a discussion or two on the Mozillazine web site about running two different versions FF2 and FF3 but it is more complicated.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

Saint_Michael

Jun 29 2007, 05:49 PM

First that is interesting that it could be done, but after it was mention about setting up profiles and all that good start I started doign some searching and it seems that there are two ways to do this; one is running firefox on linux the other is is windows.

Fair warning some don't mention which version of the browser they are using and some do, and also this post is not liable for any damages you may cause to your system.

How to set up a profile

http://lifehacker.com/software/firefox/gee...iles-231646.php

Firefox 1.5

http://dojotoolkit.org/node/209 (windows)
http://www.cts.wustl.edu/~allen/2copiesoffirefox.html (linux)

I would assume though that the programming is somewhat the same, in the sense that they just tighten up the coding and this could work with FireFox 2.0.0.4 and FireFox 3.

Google Keywords

search:run two copies of firefox

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

shadowx

Jun 29 2007, 06:58 PM

Ah id heard of profiles but had no idea how to set them up, i searched google and fund out how to do that, and it worked fine, just a pain to have to keep changing profiles all the time, then SM posted and from his link i found out abut making short cuts on my desktop so i now have my firefox developer and firefox browser all ready and working.

Thanks for the links and all the info! It was extremely useful!

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

BuffaloHELP

Jun 30 2007, 03:22 AM

It also depends on which operating system you're installing them under. The discussion so far is for Windows based. I have Ubuntu as another OS and it was able to install two versions of FireFox without creating another user profile. I can run both versions FF1.5 and FF2.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

CrashCore

Jul 26 2007, 11:16 PM

Saint_Michael's post was really helpful. Before I saw it, I was about to suggest you check out Firefox Portable, because that's another option. This isn't what it was designed for, but it would work well. So if you're using Windows, now you have two choices.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

dastrophy

Aug 7 2007, 02:36 PM

As Crashcore if you can't be bothered with using profiles on firefox, the alternative method is to use portable firefox, since the settings are not stored in one place, but rather stored within the files independent of each other: this is (obviously) ideal if you want minimal fiddling: but probably not the most efficient method, since for every different file you want, you will need the full 30MB or so for every different set of options you want. Portable firefox can also be run inside wine, so meaning (if you wanted) to run it inside linux. However I agree profiles is probably the best option

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)