Running Two Firefox Browser Profiles Concurrently

Last week, I was trying to learn how to develop a Firefox extension. One of the things I discovered, that was useful, was that I could create another Firefox profile and use that specifically for development.

So now, I have a "default" profile that I use for my daily work-related stuff and a "dev" profile that I use for researching into developing Firefox add-ons.


When I need to, I just launched the appropriate profile to suit my tasks.

Today, I wanted to launch two sessions of the Firefox browsers as I needed to log in to two different Gmail accounts (one of my many Gmail accounts is reaching the quota and I needed to transfer some of my emails... LOL).

I Googled and found this blog post on how you could run multiple copies of Firefox - http://lifehacker.com/software/firefox/geek-to-live--manage-multiple-firefox-profiles-231646.php

If you don't want to read the entire blog post and want to quickly get going, just do like what I did:

1. Press the "WINDOWS" key and "R".
2. Type in "firefox -P profile_name -no-remote".
3. Press the "ENTER" key.
4. A "Firefox - Choose User Profile" pop-up will appear. You can create a new profile or use an existing one.

Launch as many profiles as you need by following the above steps :-) Btw, I am using Windows 7. So the steps for other Windows versions might be different.

Also, if you like, you can create a Windows shortcuts for each profile you created. Cheers.

Useful Addons for Firefox

I have been using Mozilla Firefox as my primary web browser when version 1.5 was released back in 2005. Prior to that I was using Internet Explorer.

The main reason I switched to Firefox was primarily due to the "gesture" navigation add-on feature. From what I can remember, "gesture" was first introduced as a browsing feature in Opera, but I did not like the way Opera render web pages. Firefox 1.5 renders web pages to my liking and it became my primary web browser till this day.

Currently, I am using the latest Firefox 3 Beta 5. But I was waiting for the "All-in-One Gesture" add-on to support this current beta version before I made the full switch. Unfortunately, the "All-in-One Gesture" add-on has not been upgraded to support Firefox version 3.0 yet.

Then along came the "FireGesture" add-on. It is very customisable and comes with other cool features! It was the catalyst that made me switched to Firefox 3 Beta 5 full time... :-)

The other cool Firefox add-on features that I found to be indispensable for me are:

• Flashblock - Gotta love this extension!!! It is perfect for blocking those annoying FLASH-based content. You can choose to load them whenever you want by clicking on those placeholders on the web pages.
• Grab and Drag - A very useful scrolling feature for browsing web pages that exceeds the boundaries of the browser window. When activated, a hand will appear as your cursor that will allow you to grab and drag the web page to scroll in all directions.

Btw, there are many cool new features for Firefox 3.0. If you are interested to find out more, you can check it out here - Firefox 3.0 new features.