More than One Firefox (Beta) 2.0 to rule them all – a Dave Martorana concoction

Updated 12/22/08

For those of us who work on the ‘front end development’ side of things, there’s a careful balance we hang in regarding new browser releases. The short version is that as new browsers approach their release candidate status, we need to be checking and double checking our work in them to make sure that their change logs don’t break our work.

At the same time, there’s a known issue with the fact that, more often than not, running the latest beta or release candidate alongside with the production version (and, if you’re a really good developer, one previous version back from the most current production release to take care of things). Internet Explorer is notorious for this and I recall the headaches I went through beta testing it. I essentially resolved to (and continue to resolve to) use multiple virtual machines, one for each version of IE.

Well if you’re on a Mac and into testing Firefox 3 Beta without wiping your profile for Firefox 2.x, check out Dave Martorana’s MultiFirefox.

Multifox

He’s created a little launcher app that, when copied to your Apps folder along with the accompanied Firefox3.app file (appropriately renamed so it wont overwrite the stable version), will let you create and/or select an additional profile, as well as the version of Firefox that you wish to use. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it works.

You can download the dmg (2.0(003) updated 12/22/08) (again, this is mac only), or the zip of the source (2.0 updated 4/22/08) if you want to dig around the guts or, ahem, port to windows? It’s written in Python, because that’s what Dave’s a rockstar in. It’s been rewritten in Cocoa Native, because THATS what kind of rockstar Dave is. That’s not all, though, actually…aside from being an active contributing member of the IndyHall community, Dave also wrote some bitchin’ javascript a couple of weeks ago that got me out of a bind. We’re still testing that but plan to release it as a jquery plugin. Dude knows his stuff and takes a challenge on head first.

Updated DMG and source, v2.0(003) (4/18/08)

4/18/08 Changelog: Updated to include Firefox 3 Beta 5 Full rewrite to Cocoa native (severely reduced filesize) Auto-update for future versions Auto-detect of all versions of Firefox available Supposed support for OSX 10.4 (untested)

3/14/08 Changelog: Updated to Firefox 3 Beta 4

2/25/08 Changelog: Fixed minor profile bug Rework of Firefox launch code Added about screen Decreased filesize

DMG Download (17.98mb, includes FF3 Beta 5) Zip of source (661kb, does not include FF3, uncompiled launcher code only)

Dave maintains this project at his site, CodeContortionist

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

February 22, 2008 | Filed Under firefox, multifirefox | Tags: , ,

Comments 

Comments

  • Could someone please make this for windows... I am a few months away from moving over to a mac setup... and a couple of months from FF3... pls pls :-)

  • Florian

    This is wonderful! Thank you very much!

  • ea

    hi... just found this tool via google but your amazon aws link is not working. shows some xml saying that "access is denied"

  • AWS link fixed, sorry I missed the permissions when I updated the files this morning.

  • Neal
    Hi. Firefox 3 beta 5 is out. Is it safe to just get the beta 5, rename it to Firefox3.app like the one in your package, and just use that instead?

    Thanks.
  • Neal,
    You can, indeed, simply rename a new version of Firefox to Firefox3.app and it will work.

    There's a new Cocoa version that Dave is working on, it will be bundled with the newest beta as well.
  • Neal
    Oooo. I guess I'll wait for that instead then.

    Thanks lots. :D
  • Addison
    I can't get mine to work. Every time I open it, it tells me to create a new profile and so I click ok and then it quits. Any ideas? I have firefox 2 installed already. Originally it was called BonEcho because I am using a version of firefox 2 edited to run better on intel macs but then I renamed it to Firefox 2 but it still doesn't work. Hopefully you can figure out the problem.

    Thanks
  • @Addison - MultiFirefox assumes that in your /Applications folder there is at least one application named Firefox. This is obviously a bug, since you have a version called Firefox2, which it should pick up on. I'll fix this bug today and release an update. When I have, (if you have version 2.0) opening MultiFirefox will launch the auto-updater.

    I'll post back when I'm finished. Thanks for pointing that out!
  • ian
    Hey - thanks for this. Nice app. FF3 is solid, but not all service providers have caught up with it. Just found one yesterday that didn't recognise the new FF3 user-agent, so I had to roll back to FF2 to get it to work. This version switcher makes it easy to jump back if I really need to.

    Thanks
  • Ruprict
    So, I have the same problem as Addison. I start MFF and it asks if I want to check for updates. Any answer results in MFF crashing. I can send you a crash report, if you think it'd help.

    Oh, and I am on a G5....that matter?
  • @Addison, the newest version of MultiFirefox should have your problem fixed.

    @Ruprict - that is indeed an odd error, we'll figure it out together. It should not matter that you're on a G5, it's built as a Universal application targeting 10.4 and 10.5, both PPC and Intel.
  • ScottBruin
    I'm having the same problem with a crash on a 1.8ghz PowerMac G5.
  • GALA
    THANKS!
  • Jamespro
    I'm having the same crash problem as Ruprict... G4 dual 867mhz 2 GB RAM

    Thanks!
  • To all those having the crash issue:

    It's now (I'm almost sure) solved. A few core people have been kind enough to test the app after experiencing the crash issue, and are now using MultiFirefox with no problems. Sweet.

    Those experiencing the crash issue will not be able to update via auto-update, so please uninstall MultiFirefox, and download the newest version (2.0 v006) from here:

    http://codecontortionist.com/software/mac-osx-s...

    I hope this fixes everyones issues!!

    Dave
  • anyone got a windows implementation?
  • MultiFirefox lets you run FF2, FF3, and Minefield all at the same time on a Mac http://tinyurl.com/3b7yd4
  • erlecarey
    Will Firefox chooser work on windows xp? I notice that it is a dmg install.
    I want to run my Firefox 3.5 from my hard drive and Firefox 2.0 on my USB. Can this be done without launching Firefox 3.5 all the time? I guess I could run the firefx 3.5 on my usb drive but I think 3.5 is much larger than 2.0. Am I right? Can you please help me? Thanks.
    Erle Carey
blog comments powered by Disqus