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

June 27, 2008 5:58 PM

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?

posted by freddymetz to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

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.
posted by heeeraldo at 6:03 PM on June 27, 2008

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
posted by bumper314 at 6:20 PM on June 27, 2008

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

Including Firefox 3, Opera, Safari, etc.

Steve
posted by bumper314 at 6:21 PM on June 27, 2008

This worked for me.

-----

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

in case the link eventually dies.
posted by whatisish at 6:21 PM on June 27, 2008

The correct answer is to use two different profiles, as whatisish's link says to do.
posted by knave at 7:06 PM on June 27, 2008

Previously. And previouslier.
posted by Partial Law at 7:13 PM on June 27, 2008

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.
posted by amery at 7:17 PM on June 27, 2008

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.)
posted by wfrgms at 7:48 PM on June 27, 2008

Actually, you can do it within a single instance of Firefox.
posted by limon at 9:18 PM on June 27, 2008

damn! few seconds too late!
posted by limon at 9:19 PM on June 27, 2008

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

YMMV. OSX only.
posted by rickfu at 10:39 PM on June 27, 2008

Opera runs many Greasemonkey scripts natively.
posted by philomathoholic at 11:04 PM on June 27, 2008

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.
posted by krisjohn at 4:56 AM on June 28, 2008