Running a firefox tar.bz install in the homedir with separate settings from a distro installed firefox

firefoxlinux

Work's mandated a specific version of firefox that's older than I'd like. They're cool with sysadmins and general tech folk running their own stuff (as long as it doesn't trip off the auto "is this installed" script, but I notice that a second install of FF grabs profiles and such from my main install. This isn't quite optimal since I don't particularly want it trampling over my ancient FF install and breaking things.

So… can I just have a completely independent copy of firefox that has none of the stuff from my main install (maybe flash at most, but wouldn't be a major thing).

I'm running centos 6.5 if it matters, and I intend to use the tarballed version of FF in my homedir alongside an ESR release. I got root access and such to my system, but I'd rather not compile stuff if I can avoid it.

I've tried downloading and running a different version but I can't run two different versions at once, even with -no-remote. I have gotten them to run seperately (tho using the same settings and plugins) but not at the same time, by launching the local (tarballed) version with a full path.

So, in short – here's what I've done

  • downloaded a tar.bz file with a compiled version of firefox from mozilla
  • gotten it running using my default user profile, shared with mozilla from the distro.

Here's what I want to do

  • run both the distro supplied version of firefox and the tarball at the same time
  • have them independent of each other with separate settings, plugins and such.

Best Answer

Turns out it worked at work (but not on the test system oddly enough)

There's a few things here

I downloaded and untarred a current release of firefox - which should work standalone. Its under My own files are under /user_data so the directory I've untarred firefox is /user_data/firefox for me so if you're trying to do this,replace this with your own path. always use the full path so you arn't accidentally firing up a preinstalled copy of firefox.

  1. run /user_data/firefox/firefox -no-remote -CreateProfile "profile /user_data/firefox/profile/" to create a new profile inside the firefox folder (which makes this essentially portable).

  2. run firefox with /user_data/firefox/firefox -no-remote -P "profile"

This is an independent install of FF so plugins and such won't be moved over from the existing install. You'll need to copy these over as needed. You don't particularly need these tho.

Tested under centos 6.5 (and dosen't quite work in fedora 21 yet)

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