Firefox 1.5

Peter WilliamsSoftware Development

I finally upgraded to Firefox 1.5 yesterday. I had been holding out for an UbuntuUbuntu Linux completely rules, BTW. Everything I have tried has just worked. (Well, except for dual monitors but that is a different story.) package, because the reviews have been pretty mixedI would provide some links but I cannot figure out how to get NewsGator to search the posts I have already read.. I was forced to upgrade because I needed to write a Greasemonkey script to improve the usability of NewsGator OnlineThose who design web pages that render the primary content in a smaller font than the default will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. I have my fonts setup the way I do for a reason, please respect that. and the Greasemonkey site says that if you use Greasemonkey with Firefox 1.0.7 you will be instantly 0wn3d and your children will be sold into slavery.

No big deal. I can figure out how to upgrade by hand. Everything went well and now I have a shiny new Firefox on my box. Firefox 1.5 seems a little nicer but the differences to the user do seem pretty marginal. It is faster but that is about the only noticeable improvement. The configuration dialog is completely different but not really better or worse than the old one. However, multiple profile support is completely broken, as far as I can tell, which is very annoying because I used that feature quite heavily.

I havePerhaps I should say had, but I am hoping that the lazyweb can help me fix this problem. three Firefox profiles. My default profile is the one I use for normal browsing, reading my aggregator and blogging. I have another profile that I use for web development. This profile has lots of extensions installed to support web development, and it’s home page is the dev instance of the application on which I am currently working. The third profile is the one I use for looking at documentation. It has several homepages, all of which are online documentation.

In a normal day I run three instances of Firefox, one for each profile. But with Firefox 1.5 apparently you cannot run multiple instances of Firefox at all. If you start Firefox with the default profile and then execute firefox -P webdev you get another window in the default profile, rather than a new instance of firefox running the web development profile. The profiles all work if they are the only firefox process running. For example, if there is no firefox process running I can execute firefox -P webdev and I get Firefox 1.5 with my web development profile.

So my upgrade was pretty much a wash. I can read my subscriptions without my eyes hurting but I have to install a bunch of extensions in my default profile and change the way I work. It is just annoying.

5 thoughts on “Firefox 1.5”

  2. Hi!

    I found a solution to this problem, after finding your post when googling about it.

    Here is the place, where I found the information:

    http://blog.dojotoolkit.org/2005/12/01/running-multiple-versions-of-firefox-side-by-side

    And my solution under linux (i use gentoo here) is to start firefox this way:

    MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 firefox -P Profile

    This way the environment variable MOZ_NO_REMOTE is only set for one instance of firefox.

    This also works when I try to open a link from Thunderbird. It is opened in the first instance of firefox that I start this way. Exactly like the behaviour in 1.0.x

    I hope this also works for you,
    Robert

  4. Almost perfect. I dont believe I should have to reconfigure my system’s behavior to match a very large change in behavior in a minor revision of firefox. The documentation should either note that the switches for splash, profile selection, and profile manager do not work, or the software should behave as described in its documentation.

    I prefer the second, of course.

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