Running two Firefox profiles simultaneously

At yesterday’s WebSG meetup, someone asked me how you can have 2 different user sessions in Firefox, and I was unable to answer as I never had the need for 2 different user sessions (though I imagine it’d be nice for testing certain types of interactive web applications).

Anyway, I found the answer today after some Googling - Lifehacker’s “Manage multiple Firefox profiles” article.

Basically, once you have started Firefox in a profile that you want, you can start another profile by passing the ‘-no-remote’ switch together with the name of the profile you want to start with the ‘-P’ switch:

/path/to/firefox -P profile_name -no-remote

It does mean you need 2 different profiles though, for the 2 different user sessions. Oh well.

Have you tried using 2 profiles in Firefox with a server web hosting service before? It may be possible, but if you use different profiles with an Outlook Exchange server, you may have switch around. Luckily, Exchange 2007 is very easy to use and shouldn't pose any problems.

9 Comments & TrackBacks (Add yours)

The paper doll icon that precedes each comment is an idea conceived by Vanessa Tan.

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coleman yee's Gravatar

nice presentation - learnt quite a bit!

Posted by: coleman yee on March 2, 2007 12am

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choonkeat's Gravatar

ah.. thanks for digging this up. truely convenient when testing with different logins (access level)

Posted by: choonkeat on March 2, 2007 10am

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Ivan Chew's Gravatar

At first, I was wondering if I was the only one in the room who didn’t know the tricks (I knew about CTRL-T, CTRL-W but that’s about it). Then later I found out you were the author of the book. Alamak! Why didn’t Lucian tell me earlier?! I would have grabbed copies from the library and got you to sign them. Err… the library has them right? (frantically searches for it…) Cheers!

Posted by: Ivan Chew on March 5, 2007 10pm

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Rajveer's Gravatar

very nice information, i have three profiles and this is just what i needed the most!
Thanks

Posted by: Rajveer on March 19, 2007 10pm

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How to have Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 running at the same time - redemption in a blog's Gravatar

[…] gonna run Firefox 3 using our newly created profile. I’d written earlier on how you can run two Firefox profiles at the same time, and you can still do the same with Firefox […]

Posted by: How to have Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 running at the same time - redemption in a blog on August 20, 2007 8pm

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Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 | Firefox.hk's Gravatar

[…] gonna run Firefox 3 using our newly created profile. I’d written earlier on how you can run two Firefox profiles at the same time, and you can still do the same with Firefox […]

Posted by: Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 | Firefox.hk on September 20, 2007 12pm

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pix.l|ne ’s Journal » Blog Archive » Running multiple versions of Firefox together's Gravatar

[…] codefront for the tip […]

Posted by: pix.l|ne ’s Journal » Blog Archive » Running multiple versions of Firefox together on January 26, 2008 5am

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Goran Giertz - Web Strategy's Gravatar

Thank you for the post. Will go try it out. Does it allow for multiple or is it just 2.

Posted by: Goran Giertz - Web Strategy on March 7, 2008 9pm

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philip's Gravatar

excellent, thank you

Posted by: philip on May 3, 2008 6pm

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