FireFoxBrowser/RunningSimultaneousVersions

The 1.0 PR version of FireFoxBrowser was released today. Some interesting new features: See

Mozilla Firefox Preview Release Release Notes.

I was dumb in what I did today in trying it out. I downloaded and installed FF 1.0PR. It took over my FF 0.9.3 release and marked a large number of extensions that I had installed as imcompatible. Among them was the copyurlplus extension, which I find incredibly handy. I thought that I could just install FF 0.9.3 over new FF. I should have known better. My FF 0.9.3 installation no longer worked. Extensions need to be updated to handle the new version of FF (Updating Your Extensions and Themes for Firefox 1.0 Preview Release and Thunderbird 0.8) A lot of extensions have been updated -- but you can't expect all of them to have been updated. (Brings up the question of whether certain extensions will ever be updated.)

I wanted to be able to run both FF 1.0PR and FF 0.93. After some amount of effort, I think that I have both of them co-exist and even run simultaneously. The trick is to get the profile directory for FF 0.93 and FF 1.0PR to be different places. I based what I did on the advice about running multiple versions of Mozilla/Firefox at http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/Warpzilla.html:

You can run multiple versions of Mozilla / Firebird / Thunderbird at the same time, as long as you are careful. You must use different profiles for each version, and run a little script to start it (such as mozilla.cmd):

                SET MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
                SET LIBPATHSTRICT=T
                SET MOZILLA_HOME=<profile_path>
                SET PATH=<mozilla_directory>;%PATH%
                SET BEGINLIBPATH=<mozilla_directory>
                mozilla.exe

MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 keeps Mozilla from creating the parent message window, so two Mozilla's can no longer detect that each other is running. LIBPATHSTRICT=T forces DLLs to be loaded from the correct place, instead of using what is already in memory (this feature requires a recent OS/2 kernel).

I did have to modify the solution because I don't think the MOZILLA_HOME environment variable is being used. The batch files I ended up writing were:

for FF 0.9.3:

SET MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
SET LIBPATHSTRICT=T
SET MOZILLA_HOME="C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox093"
SET PATH="C:\Program Files\Mozilla FireFox 0.9.3";%PATH%
SET BEGINLIBPATH="C:\Program Files\Mozilla FireFox 0.9.3"
firefox.exe -profile "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox093\Profiles\default.vsi"

For FF 0.10:

SET MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
SET LIBPATHSTRICT=T
SET MOZILLA_HOME="C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla"
SET PATH="C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox";%PATH%
SET BEGINLIBPATH="C:\Program Files\Mozilla FireFox"
firefox.exe -profilemanager

I had to install Firefox in different directories and copy the profile in FF 0.93 from the default location (C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox to the new location C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox093

Note: I can get Firefox to run with an arbitrary profile but specifying a profile. But I could not find a way to specify an arbitrary profile directory

firefox.exe -profile "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox093\Profiles\default.vsi"

Reference: mozilla command line arguments