Mozilla Firefox is one of the most popular web browsers available today. It is an open source web browser developed by programmers from all over the world. The development phase of Firefox involves four stages – nightly, pre-beta (aurora), beta and the final release version. Some people, including me, are always using the nightly version (together with the release version) to check what new features are being added in the upcoming releases. Usually you cannot run more than one version of Firefox at the same time. But there is an easy way through which you can run two or more versions of Firefox simultaneously.
You may wonder why Firefox does not let you run more than one version of Firefox at the same time. The reason is when Firefox is running, it locks the profile folder where Firefox settings are saved. Two different versions of Firefox may end up messing your settings, so only one version can run at a single time. To work around this problem, you can set all different versions of web browsers to use a different profile folder of their own. This way they can all run at the same time. This is how:
- Right-click on the Firefox shortcut on your desktop and select Properties.
- In the Properties window that opens, switch to the Shortcut tab. You would notice the command in the Target field. You have to append the following to the command in the Target field (make sure you insert one space before this) :
-profile “Profile/” -no-remote
The -profile switch tells Firefox to use a specific profile folder. In this case, the “Profile/” folder is going to be your new profile folder for the new Firefox version. You can use a folder of any different name if you want. The -no-remote switch tells Firefox to run different versions at the same time.
- Click the OK button to save the settings and close the Properties window.
- Repeat the above steps for all the different versions of Firefox you have installed, except the release version that you use everyday regularly.
This is it. After this, you can double-click on these Firefox shortcuts to launch Firefox. All the versions would be able to run at the same time without any problem. They all would use different profile folders, so the settings (like browsing history, cookies, bookmarks etc.) would be different for all of them.