Updated 12/22/08
For those of us who work on the ‘front end development’ side of things, there’s a careful balance we hang in regarding new browser releases. The short version is that as new browsers approach their release candidate status, we need to be checking and double checking our work in them to make sure that their change logs don’t break our work.
At the same time, there’s a known issue with the fact that, more often than not, running the latest beta or release candidate alongside with the production version (and, if you’re a really good developer, one previous version back from the most current production release to take care of things). Internet Explorer is notorious for this and I recall the headaches I went through beta testing it. I essentially resolved to (and continue to resolve to) use multiple virtual machines, one for each version of IE.
Well if you’re on a Mac and into testing Firefox 3 Beta without wiping your profile for Firefox 2.x, check out Dave Martorana‘s MultiFirefox.
He’s created a little launcher app that, when copied to your Apps folder along with the accompanied Firefox3.app file (appropriately renamed so it wont overwrite the stable version), will let you create and/or select an additional profile, as well as the version of Firefox that you wish to use. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it works.
You can download the dmg (2.0(003) updated 12/22/08) (again, this is mac only), or the zip of the source (2.0 updated 4/22/08) if you want to dig around the guts or, ahem, port to windows? It’s written in Python, because that’s what Dave’s a rockstar in. It’s been rewritten in Cocoa Native, because THATS what kind of rockstar Dave is. That’s not all, though, actually…aside from being an active contributing member of the IndyHall community, Dave also wrote some bitchin’ javascript a couple of weeks ago that got me out of a bind. We’re still testing that but plan to release it as a jquery plugin. Dude knows his stuff and takes a challenge on head first.
Updated DMG and source, v2.0(003) (4/18/08)
4/18/08 Changelog: Updated to include Firefox 3 Beta 5 Full rewrite to Cocoa native (severely reduced filesize) Auto-update for future versions Auto-detect of all versions of Firefox available Supposed support for OSX 10.4 (untested)
3/14/08 Changelog: Updated to Firefox 3 Beta 4
2/25/08 Changelog: Fixed minor profile bug Rework of Firefox launch code Added about screen Decreased filesize
DMG Download (17.98mb, includes FF3 Beta 5) Zip of source (661kb, does not include FF3, uncompiled launcher code only)
Dave maintains this project at his site, CodeContortionist
[tags]dave martorana, firefox, firefox 3, firefox 3 beta, indyhall, launcher, multi profile, multifirefox, python[/tags]
