Helpful Hints – Running multiple instances of Firefox

Ever wanted to run more than one instance of Firefox? At the same time? It’s quite simple, really!

The advantages of doing this are apparent to those who might be in a multi-user environment using only one account on the PC. Also for web developers who may have a separate Firefox profile for development, and another one for regular browsing, this is a useful ability.

The way to do it is to set up a Firefox shortcut with the link target being:
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p -no-remote
You would, of course, want to modify the path to the Firefox executable depending on where you’ve installed it.

In Ubuntu, your application launcher should reference the following:

/usr/bin/firefox -p -no-remote

The keen observer will note that we’re actually providing two different command-line switches to Firefox. The “-no-remote” tells Firefox to launch in a new process, and the “-p” switch tells Firefox to bring up the Profile Manager. Without the profile manager switch, Firefox will simply try to load your default or last used profile, provided you haven’t setup Firefox to bring up the Profile Manager every time you start it.