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-remote

or

"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.

[tags]firefox 2, firefox 3[/tags]