Running Multiple Firefox Profiles for Fun and Profit
July 10, 2011 at 01:07 PM | Uncategorized | View CommentsFor a long time I have found it useful to run three (or more) different browsers: Safari for my day-to-day browsing, Firefox for my development work and Camino for Facebook and Google apps. This separation is part pragmatism – it's useful to clear cookies or disable FlashBlock while I'm developing without my main browser being affected – and part paranoia – I'm not logged in to Facebook or Google on my main browser, so it's harder for them to track me and I'm less likely to be hurt by a cross-site-scripting (or similar) attack.
Recently Safari's memory leaks [0] and the launch of Firefox 5 have pushed me to re-evaluating my browser preferences... And this is the result:

Three customized versions of Firefox and three profiles to match.
The customizations are straight forward:
- Firefox.app was copied three times, and the name was to the role of that copy (“Browsing.app”, etc).
- The icon was changed on each app.
- The CFBundleName in $NAME.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/InfoPlist.strings was changed from “Firefox” to $NAME (changing the application name which appears in the top left corner of the screen).
- After the “Browsing” profile was setup (correct plugins installed, etc), it was copied twice to create the “Dev” and “Facebook” profiles (profiles are stored at ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/, and the profiles.ini file, in Application Support/Firefox/, must also be updated).
- A persona was added to the “Facebook” and “Dev” profiles (specifically a pastel sky blue and pastel mandarin).
- NoScript was installed on the “Facebook” profile (for a little bit of added paranoia).
With these customizations, it's easy to visually distinguish between the browsers, both from the main windows:

And from the dock/command+tab application list:

And that's my current browsing setup :)
[0] | it would be using almost a gigabyte of memory, even if I only had one or two tabs open. |