support firefox profiles best as possible
Profile support for ffox on the mac is a bit opaque, but I use it to keep a completely separate environment for e.g. online banking.
From the shell ".../Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -ProfileManager" lets you create new profiles, and then ".../Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -ProfileManager -P ProfileName" will launch firefox with a particular profile.
When you launch ffox this way, you can have multiple copies of it running at the same time. I don't really expect choosy to know what to do here automatically (prompt maybe?).
However, when you quit any ffox instance Choosy loses track of the other running ffox processes and no longer shows a check next to it in the menu. This I consider a bug... I have to exit and relaunch either choosy or ffox for it to start sending urls to ffox again.
anonymous
shared this idea
I would love to support Firefox profiles in the same was as Chrome profiles (where each profile can be treated as a distinct browser). Unfortunately, that hasn’t been possible to achieve so far.
Firefox does have command line arguments that can be used to launch a new instance of the browser for a specific profile, but once it’s running there’s no way I can find to control which profile a newly opened link will be sent to (the closest I’ve been able to get is forcing Firefox to start a another new instance for the profile, which opens the link in the right profile, but also causes the previous profile instance—and any windows or tabs it had open—to quit).
I’ll keep coming back and reviewing this—maybe it will become possible in future Firefox versions.
5 comments
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Chris
commented
not sure if its possible or helps but...
Is it possible to get a list of all running process ID's for firefox and then use something like 'lsof' to see what files they have open. Then maybe using that list you could see which has a given profile open to know which pid to target? -
Kirill
commented
George, what if you take control of the profiles.ini, change `Default=1` to the profile you want to open the URL in and then return it back to where it was?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4679702/from-a-shell-script-open-a-new-tab-in-a-specific-instance-of-firefox -
Jesús Dugarte
commented
Hello! Has anything been done about this? I'm looking for a way to choose between two Firefox profiles when I click in a link. Thanks!
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Chris
commented
I use a different firefox profile for each project I work on. Right now I use MultiFirefox to make this more seamless.
If Choosy would allow me to specify which profile based hostname/url etc... that would make a seamless experience.
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Anonymous
commented
agreed. I'd buy choosy if it supported firefox profiles, but for now I'm giving up on it.