Every Flavour Beans

Mozilla has recently announced Release Candidate 3(RC3) of the next version of Firefox - Firefox 2.0. Those who can’t wait for the final version to be released before having a peek at the new features(not too many actually) that will be part of Firefox 2.0 can grab the RC3 version and install it on their systems. For Windows users there is an all familiar wizard based installer file to install it, but remember that it will overwrite the existing Firefox installation, so make sure that you really want to move to a version that is not completely bug free yet(release candidates are fairly stable but of course not as stable as the final version) and you understand that you might have to live with a broken installation if luck is not on your side. In any case, backup the current profile before attempting to upgrade to RC3 so that you can go back to it by reinstalling the stable version if things do go wrong.

The same thing applies to the GNU/Linux users too: grab the tar ball of the RC3 version of Firefox 2.0 and install it on your system(again ). But if you want to minimize the risk of corrupting the current Firefox installation and still want to get a sneak peek into what the next version of Firefox is going to be like, you can just extract the Firefox 2.0 RC3 tar file into a separate folder in your home directory, create a new profile for it and run the new version of Firefox using this newly created profile; this way, you can continue to use the stable version of the Firefox with your older profile. Below is the procedure on how to do this.

NOTE: Remember that we are only trying to use separate profiles with the two versions of Firefox here, they might still share a lot of other files between themselves. That is why it is always a good idea to start with a complete backup of the existing installation. I usually backup the entire “.mozilla” directory present in the home directory like this:

Download the latest Firefox 2 Release Candidate version and extract it in your home directory(link of the English version is used in the following example):

Now we need to load the new version of Firefox with a freshly created profile. Run the following command from the extracted directory:

From the popped up dialog box, click “Create Profile” button and follow the wizard(enter a name like “firefoxrc3″ when prompted if you wish, or accept the default profile name).

Click Finish to dismiss the wizard box. You can now see the newly created profile being listed in the “Choose Profile” dialog box. Select it and click “Start Firefox” button to start the web browser.

You can customise the environment to the heart’s content now, without worrying about corrupting the older profile. From the next time onwards, just run the command from the Firefox 2 RC3 directory and choose the profile that was created for it. When you want to run the older Firefox version, just remember to pick the default profile and you will get into the same old environment.

The process can be simplified by creating a new desktop/menu/panel item and entering the appropriate command(“$HOME/firefox/firefox -ProfileManager”) in its property box(right click and select properties).

If you don’t want to start with an empty profile for the new version of Firefox, then you need to search the Internet to find a way to make a copy of the existing profile(or have a look in $HOME/.mozilla/firefox folder for hints). You can then let the new Firefox version to use the copy of the default profile instead of creating a new profile for it.