18

Let's say, Firefox's instance is running with profile 1. Is it now possible, to start a new Firefox instance with profile 2?

Normally, when Firefox is already running, no new instance is created. Instead, just a new browser window is opened.

Note: By saying "profile", I'm referring to Firefox user profiles.

fixer1234
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linux_is_for_desktop
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5 Answers5

9

You can do it from the command line:

firefox -no-remote -P profile_name
hasen
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5

Try MultiFirefox:

MultiFirefox is a small launcher utility that allows you to run multiple versions of Firefox side-by-side. It helps you set up multiple profiles (one or more for each version of Firefox), remembers your last launch preferences for easy launching, has auto-updating built in for when we make improvements, and is 100% open source, MIT licensed.

alex
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brandstaetter
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3

Using an unx environement, you can use a command like :

env MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 firefox -P Profile2

Using a windows or Mac OS X env, I don't know how you can do it

slubman
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2

Here's an article from Lifehacker dealing with this. It's not extremely complicated, I've used this a couple of times.

alex
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0

An alternative to using the Profile manager (the -P switch described in @hasen's answer) is to specify the path to profile directly in the command line.

firefox -no-remote -profile absolute-path-to-the-profile-dir will create the directory specified (if it doesn't exist) and use it as the profile.

Example on Windows:

C:\Progra~1\Firefox\firefox.exe -no-remote -profile C:\FxProfiles\myprofile

On OS X it is slightly more complicated:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -foreground \
   -no-remote -profile /Users/me/fx-profiles/myprofile

-foreground switches from the terminal window to Firefox. Note that on 10.5 you have to use an even more complicated comand to work around the dyld error.

See also Starting Firefox with a specified profile from the dock (Mac OS X).

Community
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Nickolay
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