I had the same need like you : running many instances of firefox on the same machine.
Basically, when you run an instance of firefox, there is a folder .mozilla
in your $HOME
is created ( if it is not existed yet). You can use the multi-profile solution if you want, as iglvzx mentioned above. So all user's profiles live in that .mozilla directory(database).
I have another trick which I think is more elegant than that solution.
Create a directory to save a new firefox:
$ mkdir $HOME/new_firefox
$ cd $HOME/new_firefox
$ tar xvf setup/firefox-33.0.tar.bz2
Then create a small script like:
#!/bin/sh
HOME=$HOME/new_firefox
$HOME/firefox/firefox -no-remote &
So now run the scrip to have another instance of firefox. And your new user's profile live in $HOME/new_firefox/.mozilla
.
If you use GNOME, just create a new_firefox.desktop
file and put it in /usr/share/applications
directory or in $HOME/.local/share/applications
directory. The Exec
argument in that file is Exec=/home/your_name/path-to-your-script
. If you don't know how to create one, see an existed one in either of 2 above directory.
3@martineau I dont think you understand "new instance". That is 2 processes of
firefox
. – Steven Penny – 2013-02-16T20:30:10.627