$®¢: Shauvik’s Weblog

I’ve been a Firefox user from 5 years and i have preferred it over other browsers. Recently i have also been trying Chrome and the Firefox based Flock browser.

Chrome is a new browser with loads of new features and this blog post is about how to achieve some of those things using Firefox.

The Firefox ProfileManager provides a way to maintain many profiles and keep their settings separate. This feature can be used for getting most of the chrome-like features.

Creating a new profile: Just start firefox with the -ProfileManager flag and it would give you a dialog to manage profiles. When you have created a profile, just use -P <profilename> to use that profile. Adding a -no-remote flag allows firefox to run with multiple profiles.

1. Application Shortcuts: This chrome feature is not a big deal. You can do this by using a separate profile that has all toolbars hidden (for fullscreen effect).
   I have setup desktop/start menu shortcut for gmail (just like how chrome adds)
2. Web-Page Isolation: Chrome starts a new process for every webpage. This feature prevents a crashed page(/plugin in a page) from crashing the browser.  I categorize sites as mainly work related (gmail, calendar, docs etc.) or social/information related (all other sites.). The main requirement for me is to isolate these 2 groups.(esp. my email/gmail from every other site)So, i use a separate profile for my gmail. And since firefox instances using other profiles don’t have a gmail session; my gmail is isolated from them.
   
   
3. Incognito mode: This is an anonymous browsing feature in chrome used for private browsing. Again, you can setup a new profile in which history saving is turned off or turn on Private data clearing on browser close.
   

@Readers: Please let me know any cool firefox hacks/shortcuts you know and i’ll post a link to them here.

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chrome, firefox, flock, gmail, incongnito, isolate