Firefox 2 and 3 Living Together in Harmony
By Troy on Jun 18, 2008 in Misc
Believe it or not, after installing Firefox 3, at least one of the web sites I had designed using CSS broke. I’m not sure if it is because Firefox 3 is more strict or less strict with the CSS, but it didn’t really matter – it was broken. So I fixed it in Firefox 3, then it was broken again in 2. The dilemna was suddenly upon me. Yes, just like IE… I had to run 2 instances of Firefox.
But it wasn’t that easy.
NOTE: This references paths for Windows, but Mac users can perform a similar task using the same commands/techniques.
Profiles
Firefox uses Profiles to contain your favorites and settings. Most people never see these profiles since they just start it up and use the Default User profile. This is usually adequate for most users but some, like me, need more than one profile.
So, first I had to make a new profile. Since I already had Firefox 3 installed and over-wrote my Firefox 2, I was going to create a new profile and use the new one for Firefox 3.
To create a new profile, I had to exit Firefox and then click on Start, Run and browsed to the location that Firefox3 was in. Then, I had to type in -profilemanager to launch the manager. so, the run command looked something like:
c:\program files\mozilla.org\firefox3\firefox.exe -profilemanager
This brought up a Profile selection screen, where I clicked on Create Profile and created the new profile. Then I double clicked that new profile, and Firefox3 launched with that profile.
Downloading Firefox 2 Again
The next task was to redownload Firefox2, which you can find at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/2.0.0.14/
I then installed it into a separate directory than Firefox 3.
when you double click it the firefox icon, you will now get the OLD Firefox (since it tells Windows that Firefox is now in the Firefox2 directory.
Create Shortcut
Create a new shortcut that you want to use for your Firefox3 icon, right click on it and choose properties so you can change the location of the executable. Make it point to your Firefox3 directory. You might also want to rename the shortcut “Firefox 3″ instead of just plain Firefox too.
There is one little thing you have to do to the Firefox3 icon. You need to specify the profile.
For instance the shortcut should look like:
shortcut_to_firefox.exe -P profilename-no-remoteor "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P profilename -no-remote
Voila! You should be able to run both Firefox2 and Firefox3 side by side. You can even import your bookmarks if you want.
[...] For written instructions, just scroll down, or click here for a written tutorial on running Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 at the same time. [...]
Thanks for the tip.
Nice… thanks for the info
[...] zur Verfügung. Unter Windows muss man manuell ein neues Profil anlegen – wie das geht, ist an dieser Stelle erklärt. Für Linux gilt das gleiche wie für Windows: Neues Profil anlegen, alten Firefox herunterladen [...]
Nice article but I am using Firefox portable version with 1.5, 2.x and 3.x.
Is there any difference with both methods?
[...] ohne Probleme auf PC und [...]
You can also install a portable version. I thinks that’s less intrusive.
Get it here:
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet
Thanks, nice tip.
Nice tip. Thank you. Will try this later
nice tip — works fine! I had a problem with my FireFox 3 shortcut, because I had specified “-P t8ilt26l.default” which is exactly how the default profile folder is named in \%USER%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
but this caused Firefox 3 to keep asking me “which profile?” on start-up. Despite the fact I kept checking/unchecking “Don’t ask on start-up”, the problem was that I just needed to specify “default”
So my two shortcuts look like this:
\Mozilla FireFox3\firefox.exe -P default -no-remote
\Mozilla FireFox2\firefox.exe -P firefox-2 -no-remote
[...] computer so we can check site compatibility in both browsers. The original tutorial is located at TroyRutter.com but I made it a little more conducive to my “special” needs below (after failing a few times I [...]
[...] I needed a way to get a version 2 installed at the same time. I found some simple instructions: Firefox 2 and 3 Living Together in Harmony. My install was slightly different than the one described because I wanted to keep my existing [...]
[...] are some step-by-step instructions for Mac users. (If you’re on a Windows machine, this walkthrough from Troy Rutter should do the [...]
Thank you very much! I’ve been trying to do this for ages!
I wanted a separate FF installation to use as a .ODF reader (with the ODFReader addon for 2.0) and this is just what I needed.