Run Firefox 3 Without Affecting Your Existing Firefox 2 Settings

12 dec 2007

Use Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 on the same machine without modifying the settings of Firefox 2.

firefox 3 search Firefox 3 sports a better bookmark manager and is supposed to render web pages more quickly than Firefox 2. The current release of Firefox 3 is in beta but decent enough for you to try it on your computer.

So if you are ready to take the plunge but do not want Firefox 3 to mess-up with your current browser settings, here’s a very safe route for running the new Firefox 3 alongside your existing Firefox 2 install.

1. Download the Firefox 3 Portable edition from – Sourceforge.net.

2. Extract this Firefox 3 installer to some new folder like C:\Firefox3

3. Close your Firefox 2 browser and run the FirefoxPortable.exe file available in the above folder. That’s it.

For additional safety, you can consider creating a backup of your existing Firefox 2 profile that’s available in the following path under the name xxx.default

C:\Documents and Settings\<name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

And even with release 3, your Firefox Passwords are still not very safe.

Related: Speed Up Your Slow Firefox

http://www.goforads.com Rajeev Hirani

Isn’t mozilla offering a simple update through its updater? From firefox to firefox 2 I have come along using that only.
http://www.informationaddicts.com jsanderz

Amit,
Thanks for the tip, I will give it a try. I find Firefox 2 is becoming more and more CPU intensive. I wonder if the next version will be any better.
Regards.
SA

You can run Portable Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 versions at a same time. You will need to create FirefoxPortable.ini file using notepad having following contents:

[FirefoxPortable]
FirefoxDirectory=App\firefox
ProfileDirectory=Data\profile
SettingsDirectory=Data\settings
PluginsDirectory=Data\plugins
FirefoxExecutable=firefox.exe
AdditionalParameters=
LocalHomepage=
DisableSplashScreen=false
AllowMultipleInstances=true
DisableIntelligentStart=false
SkipChromeFix=false
SkipCompregFix=false
RunLocally=false

Critical command is AllowMultipleInstances=true which will allow multiple sessions of Firefox if set to “true”

Hope this helps.
–
SA

Once you have made FirefoxPortable.ini file, put that file into root folder – portable firefox 3 and things should work thenafter.
nimd4

Rajeev Hirani, this is a beta (3) release..
http://tux.medhas.org Prasad

We can use a Master Password on Linux to double encrypt the passwords on Firefox.

The saved passwords are encrypted using a key and the key is encrypted using the master password.

Technology, Software and Internet

Run Firefox 3 Without Affecting Your Existing Firefox 2 Settings

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