Comments on: How do i use two instances of firefox at the same time?

Question: How do i use two instances of firefox at the same time?

freddymetz — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:58:51 -0800

How do i use two separate instances of firefox at the same time?

The thing it, it has to be firefox (because of greasemonkey) so i cant use a different browser (or can i?) and i have to be able to log-in to the same website with two different accounts.
Any ideas?

By: heeeraldo

heeeraldo — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:03:45 -0800

you might be able to install a stable version and a nightly and run them concurrently; I did that with FF2/FF3b4 for a while.

By: bumper314

bumper314 — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:20:48 -0800

I have found a few solutions using virtual environments. Here are your options:

1) You can download this Thinstalled version of Firefox and run it along side another instance.
http://thinstall.com/downloads/firefox_autoplay.exe
Thinstall wraps applications into a transparent sandbox environment. Very cool technology

2) MojoPac creates a virtual environment on either a flash drive or a folder on your local hard drive. It looks and feels just like a windows environment, but it's not as transparent as Thinstall.
http://www.mojopac.com/portal/content/hellomojo.jsp

By: bumper314

bumper314 — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:21:41 -0800

Also, you can find more Thinstalled applications here:
http://www.thindownload.com/

Including Firefox 3, Opera, Safari, etc.

Steve

By: whatisish

whatisish — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:21:50 -0800

This worked for me.

-----

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p -no-remote

in case the link eventually dies.

By: knave

knave — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:06:58 -0800

The correct answer is to use two different profiles, as whatisish's link says to do.

By: Partial Law

Partial Law — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:13:16 -0800

Previously. And previouslier.

By: amery

amery — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:17:07 -0800

You want to run Firefox with two different profiles. When you do this, Firefox will keep login information for each profile separate (for example, you could be logged in to Metafilter with Profile A and logged out with Profile B, all at the same time).

So. Start up the Firefox profile manager. I do this from the command line, and the exact command you use varies by OS:

1. Linux: /path/to/your/firefox -ProfileManager
2. Windows: "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -ProfileManager
3. OS X: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -ProfileManager

Create two profiles. Launch Firefox twice with the command above, and pick a different profile each time. Done!

You can also use this trick to run two different versions of Firefox, which I like to do when I'm testing an extension against (say) 2.x and 3.x.

NB: I didn't specify the actual path for Linux since it varies by distro. You might be able to get away with doing

`which firefox` -ProfileManager

assuming your Firefox binary is called 'firefox' and further assuming that it's on your $PATH.

By: wfrgms

wfrgms — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:48:26 -0800

whatisish has it. Use a 2nd profile. I did this to run the 64-bit 3.0 beta and the 2.0. (I've since ditched the 64-bit... it was sweet when it worked, not so great when it sploded.)

By: WCityMike

WCityMike — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:17:20 -0800

CookiePie.

By: limon

limon — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:18:51 -0800

Actually, you can do it within a single instance of Firefox.

By: limon

limon — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:19:17 -0800

damn! few seconds too late!

By: rickfu

rickfu — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:39:37 -0800

MultiFirefox may be useful here. I recently downloaded it but haven't yet tried it though.

YMMV. OSX only.

By: philomathoholic

philomathoholic — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:04:26 -0800

Opera runs many Greasemonkey scripts natively.

By: krisjohn

krisjohn — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 04:56:26 -0800

Sounds like the profile thing solves it, but if not you could try Flock. It's based on Firefox, but isn't firefox.exe so it will happily run at the same time.