Firefox ProfileManager in OSX

Tony Buser — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 16:33:00 -0500

As a developer I often need to have seperate Firefox sessions open. In Linux all I had to do was change the command to run firefox with the -ProfileManager switch. Unfortunately it's not that easy in OSX since the icons in the Dock don't have commands behind them.

For a while I got by with running a shell script from the terminal, but that wasn't very nice. What I ended up doing was creating an apple script with the following line:

do shell script "/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -ProfileManager &> /dev/null &"

Save it as an application. Change it's icon. (In case you don't know how, it's a little odd in OSX you can copy one applications icon to another by right clicking on Firefox -> Get Info. Click the small icon in the top left, cmd-c to copy it, then Get Info on your apple script application, click the icon in the upper left and cmd-v to paste it). Drag it to the Dock and now whenever you click it, it should open a new firefox with the Profile Manager window allowing you to select a different profile.

One thing that sucks is that the Profile Manager window doesn't open in the foreground. Not sure how to fix it, but it's still better then having to goto a terminal to open a different profile.

Juju: Firefox ProfileManager in OSX

Firefox ProfileManager in OSX