Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Running Firefox 3.x and 4 Beta in parallel

I like running the latest browser - even beta - but don't like upgrading my existing profile and loosing all my extensions. Here's a way to run them in parallel.

  • I install Firefox 4 beta, and add the -p -no-remote to the shortcut before I even run it. This lets me create a brand new profile I called Beta.4
  • Run the new FF and close it to set up a new Firefox 4 profile for the transition
  • Copy the contents of my old Firefox 3 profile (under your user app data folders) to the newly created Firefox 4 profile folders
  • Update the shortcuts for the new Firefox 4 and old Firefox 3 to include the profile names so I'm not prompted each launch, and then I can run them both independently!!
    • FF3 sample shortcut - "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p default -no-remote
    • FF4 sample shortcut - "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 4.0\firefox.exe" -p Beta.4 -no-remote
Reference
http://www.techspot.com/guides/306-how-to-run-two-firefox-instances/

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