Firefox 2 & 3 in OS X applications folder

Starting the Firefox profile manager from a terminal

Set a profile name for a new profile

Select your profile on startup

Firefox2 and 3 running side by side

Hi,

some days ago, I wrote that I'm not very happy with Firefox 3. On the one hand I want to use it because it's much faster than FF2 but on the other hand I can't use it on some installations or because of some other issues. So what should I do now? Per default it's not possible to run both browsers at the same time. Normally it's not even possible to install both browsers on the same system. But there is very easy work around for this problems.

1. Install both browsers on one system

That is actually pretty easy. I estimate, that you have FF2 already installed. So it laying around in your applications folder. All you have to do is, to rename it to "Firefox2" and install FF3 afterwards by dragging it into your applications folder (see screenshot 1). That was easy, wasn't it?

2. Run both browser simultaneously

When you try to start up both browsers parrallel, you'll get an error that tells you that it is not possible to run both browsers at the same time. That might be no problem for most of you but if you do your usual browsing with FF3 and need FF2 for a certain TYPO3 backend you are forced to shut down FF3. Not nice, but there is a solution.

• First thing you have to do is to shut down all running firefox instances.
• Now open a terminal and type in
  
  /Applications/Firefox2.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -ProfileManager
  
  The profile manager opens and you'll get something like in screenshot 3. (At this point it doesn't matter which firefox is used for starting the profile manager.)
• Now create a new profile in the profile manager and give it a name. You should use a speaking name like "Firefox2" and "Firefox3" .

Now that you have 2 profiles, firefox will ask your for the profile it should use for the session. Yo you have 1 click for for starting firefox, but that is feasible I think. You can now select one profile (e.g. "Firefox 2") for Firefox2 and the other profile for Firefox3. This has two advantages. First of all you have separate settings for both browsers. In most cases it's not a problem but a few settings overrides some things for one or another browser version. You can also install different plugins and add-ons for each brower version. So you could set-up a lightweight browsing version and heavy firefox with a lot of development plugins. The second advantage is, that you can start both browsers at the same time. Et voilá... :-)

I hope that helps someone to get the best of both Firefox worlds.

Greets,
Thomas