Coredump
Work, play, and everything in-between 

Multiple (Firefox) personalities

Posted in Play on 18 August 2009 | Comments?
Tags: firefox, mozilla, opensource, tips, web

Er… profiles, I mean.

I use Firefox add-ons for the occasional web development tasks. (Too bad, not all my favorite extensions are available in the workplace’s “blessed” add-ons repository, but I can live with what’s in there.) Sometimes, though, having too many add-ons slows down the browsing experience, specially for times when you just need to browse stuff and not much else.

The solution: create separate profiles for “normal” browsing and for web development (“debug” mode). Using Profile Manager, I created two profiles: “normal” and “debug”.

Any Firefox instance can be launched by using the -ProfileManager switch. I also use -no-remote so a new instance — not a new window — is opened every time.

I load up the “debug” instance with all the add-ons I require: among them, Web Developer, Firebug and Greasemonkey are the most important.

To differentiate debug mode from the normal-browsing instance, I would have to change the window title. For this, I loaded the Nightly Tester Tools add-on, which allows me to tweak the window title, among other things.

(I used the following string for the window title:

${DefaultTitle} ${Version} (Build ${AppBuildID}) - ${Profile}

Other variables are available in Menu > Tools > Nightly Tester Tools > Options.)

I can then open both modes side by side:

Update: Now that Personas are available, I’ve opted to use different ones for my normal (Firefox Robot) and debug (Carbon Fox) modes.

Read more:

• ‘Klaatu barada nikto!’
• Firefox 3 to support offline apps
• Creating a Firefox search plugin
• Experiments with the eee
• Movable

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