How to: Running Multiple Firefox Instances
Posted on Sunday, November 9th, 2008 under TutorialsSetting up multiple instances of Firefox is a 5 minute task which is made possible by the creation of separate profiles, whereby each instance of Firefox will use its own profile. A few key points about profiles:
- Every profile has its own set of bookmarks, extensions, themes and browsing history.
- If one instance of Firefox crashes, it will not bring down other instances of Firefox running under different profiles.
- The only thing shared between profiles are the plugins (Java, Flash, etc).
- Separate profiles can be used to run different versions of Firefox at the same time.
Here’s how it’s done:
- Launch the profile manager to create a new profile:
“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -profilemanager
Make sure you close all current instances of Firefox otherwise it will simply open a new window instead of the manager.
- Create a new profile. I would recommend using a single lowercase word.
- Modify your Firefox shortcut to look like this:
“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -P “profile-name”
- Now that you’ve setup separate profiles, you still need to tell Firefox to run them independently of one another, by adding the “-no-remote” option to one or both of your shortcuts:
“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -P “profile-name” -no-remote
-no-remote allows you to run multiple profiles simultaneously, otherwise any new request to open a Firefox window will simply attach the window to the profile that’s already running.
-no-remote effectively tells Firefox to open an independent instance of the indicated profile.
The disadvantage of the -no-remote option is that it limits you to one instance of a profile at any given time, so clicking twice on a Firefox shortcut that has the -no-remote parameter will give you the following error.
Getting around this is fairly simple: only add -no-remote to the profile that you expect to use less often.
Tags: firefox
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Thanks for this Stanley. Do you know how to copy one profile to another?
[...] from any existing Firefox installation you might have already had. I would recommend creating a separate Firefox profile to use for this [...]
You’ll be my hero if you can make this all happen in Ruby and extend the Browser.new function to allow you to choose a profile upon launch…
So I finally started digging…apparently, if you just pass a :profile => “example_profile” to the browser.new function, it should load that profile. This would be perfect if coupled with a script that checked to see if a profile existed for whatever app you’re running, and if it doesn’t exist, creates a basic one, then continues on to launching the browser.
# Description:
# Starts the firefox browser.
# On windows this starts the first version listed in the registry.
#
# Input:
# options – Hash of any of the following options:
# :waitTime – Time to wait for Firefox to start. By default it waits for 2 seconds.
# This is done because if Firefox is not started and we try to connect
# to jssh on port 9997 an exception is thrown.
# :profile – The Firefox profile to use. If none is specified, Firefox will use
# the last used profile.
# :suppress_launch_process – do not create a new firefox process. Connect to an existing one.
# TODO: Start the firefox version given by user.
I want to load extensions automatically without restarting firefox when ever i do a modification.
Is that possible. Now when i change a js file for an extension i need to close and reopen firefox for the modification to take effect. instead is that any method to reload the modified js file without restarting firefox?