Using two different Firefox version in same machine.

It was @contactnaveen who made me to find whether there is any such possibilities to make two different version of FireFox run on a single machine.

My Ubuntu machine at home is a Jaunty 9.04 with kernel 2.6.28-14-generic, I had an Ubuntu based FireFox of 3.0.13 in built & I tried to make the latest version 3.5.2 up & running simultaneously.

Step 1:

First download the Latest Firefox from Mozilla Website. Bunzip & Untar the file in /opt directory. [It's my preferred directory you can do this in under any directory ;-)]

Step 2:

From Command Line execute the following command:

prakash@home:~$ firefox -ProfileManager

It will open the profile manager of FireFox. By default the profile manager will appear as below if you don't have multiple profiles already.



Now add a new profile by clicking the Create Profile button & give a name to your new profile.



After adding the new profile just exit.

Step 3:

From command line open the inbuilt FireFox of 3.0.13 using the following command.

prakash@home:~$ firefox -P default &

-P is the argument Profile Name, if you got a different profile name for your inbuilt version itself then can use that too. '&' symbol is to open the FireFox process in background.

Step 4:

From command line open the latest FireFox of 3.5.2 using the following command.

prakash@home:~$ /opt/firefox/firefox -P Test -no-remote &

I have saved my new build under /opt so I'm using that path. If you have saved in any other location please use the complete path to the firefox binay file.

Here I'm using the new profile name Test (that we created in Step 2) for the argument -P. -no-remote is asking the FireFox to use a new instance of it while opening, if we don't pass that argument it will open a new window but it will be same instance of previously opened FireFox.

Now you can use two different FireFox in the same machine. :-)



Enjoy using two different version of FireFox or two different instance of FireFox in a same machine :-)


Caution: I have identified a small hook here. If you currently using default profile and there is no profile and if you have remembered all your Passwords using "Password Manager", while creating a new profile all the saved password got wiped out. Hence it's better to create a new profile (instead of default), save all your password in that profile then go ahead with the above exercise.