Firefox 2 and 3 Dual Install

brett — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:01:00 +0000

I need to test our application in our supported browsers, including both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3. Also, some of the extensions that I use don’t yet work with FF3.

We can sandbox the ‘foxes (and their settings, extensions) by creating distinct profiles and wrapper scripts to run each version of FF with its respective profile.

Fire up the Profile Manager:

firefox -ProfileManager

and create a new profile (”ff3″)

For consistency’s sake, edit ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini and rename “Default” to “ff2″:

[Profile0]
Name=ff2
IsRelative=1
Path=2k5iwgg1.default

[Profile1]
Name=ff3
IsRelative=1
Path=2zopbwoy.ff3

Create a couple of shell scripts (ff2 and ff3):

#!/bin/sh
firefox-2 -P ff2

#!/bin/sh
firefox-3.0 -P ff3

and you are done. Mine live in ~/bin (which is prepended to my path), along with a symlink ‘firefox’ pointing to ff2. Once all my must-have extensions are upgraded, I’ll change the symlink to point to ff3.

A Lonely Impulse » firefox

Firefox 2 and 3 Dual Install