Possible to run side by side by side with Beta & Developer Edition

Firefox Nightly
#1

I’d like to run Beta, Developer Edition and Nightly all side by side one another. I’ve created three Firefox profiles called beta-default, dev-edition-default, and nightly-edition-default.

Beta and Dev Edition run perfect side by side right out of the box. When I set nightly to it’s profile and launch it from the profile manager I can have all three up at once if I already had Beta and Dev Edition open. If I close all three and try to reopen from my MacOS dock Beta and Dev will launch but Nightly will hangup saying a copy of Firefox is already running. I open the profile manager and sure enough for some reason it’s switched back to the ‘beta-default’ profile.

Can I not have nightly and beta running side by side automatically? Like I said, if I launch them with separate profiles from the profile manager I can get all 3 up at once.

I’m running these commands:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox --profilemanager

/Applications/FirefoxDeveloperEdition.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox --profilemanager

/Applications/FirefoxNightly.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox - -profilemanager

and setting each profile accordingly. If I launch from here then all is well. If I launch from my MacOS dock, Beta and Nightly like to switch profiles and run from the same one.

Side Question: Any possible way to also get Stable into the mix? By default Stable overrides Beta during installation because they’re both named Firefox. Just curious.

#2

You should run these commands instead:
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -no-remote -p <name of your release profile>

/Applications/FirefoxDeveloperEdition.app -no-remote -p <name of your dev edition profile>

/Applications/FirefoxNightly.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -no-remote -p <name of your nightly profile>

If you don’t specify the name of the profile, Firefox will launch with the last profile you used. Hence the bug

#3

Thank you for the reply @flore ! Hmm, that gets all three running perfectly however if I exit out of all three and try to launch from the dock or applications folder icon instead of from the terminal I get a block between Beta & Nightly. The commands I used were:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -no-remote -p beta-default

/Applications/FirefoxDeveloperEdition.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -no-remote -p dev-edition-default

/Applications/FirefoxNightly.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -no-remote -p nightly-edition-default

#4

When you launch from the dock (or app folder), the app launches using the last profile used. And not a specific profile. Did you notice that all 3 version have the same exec file name: firefox? The app name is nothing but a folder. So the process is the same and it does not discriminate which profile was used depending of the folder from where it was launched.

You can’t avoid the terminal, or you can create a script for each version and run it from the desktop for example. But you can’t launch it from the dock and expect it to know what profile to use.

#5

@flore I did notice that, hmm well that stinks. Terminal script it is then when I want all three up. Thank you for helping me with the proper commands!

Semi-unrelated but do you know if it’s possible to have Firefox Stable installed along with Beta? They both share the same application name so overwrite one another. Not an issue if I can’t but am just curious.

#6

You could install beta in another folder (like Applications folder in your user folder): /Users/Chris/Applications/
It does not really matters where the application is located on the drive. It’s just better to keep them all in the same place. Otherwise it will work just fine anywhere else.

1 Like
#7

Makes sense. Thank you!

#8

You can also set to it to ask which profile to use at startup through the profile manager. That’s what I do as I regularly switch and create new profiles.

1 Like
#9

Dear Mozilla,

I have been runnig regular FireFox and the Developer Edition side by side for a very long time.
On both personal PC and proffessional Laptop…
One is linked to my private account, the other to my proffessional.
This has been working just peachy since day one.

Now, all of a sudden FireFox updates and
A) It’s like a full reset, needs to reload every addon and i had to re-setup every personalization aside from my Account.
B) I can no longer run regular FireFox next to the Dev one… if one is running and I open the other i now states “Firefox is already running, but is not responding” and is making no sense at all…
If i close One, and open the Other, it reloads my session as if DevEd = regular Firefox.

So, what the hell… I am not amused
What now ? Please tell me this will be fixed, i would prefer not using a Chrome.