Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 co-habiting on Ubuntu 8.04

brad — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:29:11 +0200

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). I was pleasantly surprised when Firefox 3 greeted me as the default browser, but then hit a few speed bumps. Being a web developer I constantly use tools like firebug and MeasureIt. Unfortunately, until Firefox 3 is widespread (and released), many extensions don't work (there are hacks, but they come with problems). So I don't want to go back to Firefox 2 as my browser, because when I did try there were some issues with downgrading my profile, and I have become quite used to bookmark tags, awesomebar, the incredible difference in memory consumption, and the Save & Exit prompt. Running Firefox 2 concurrently is possible though, it comes at a price though.

Firstly, install firefox-2:

sudo apt-get install firefox-2

I went the route of using a separate user for FF2, but you could probably use profiles? So:

Create a candidate user:

sudo adduser firefox2

(where firefox2 is the username)

Then you can run firefox-2 as the user firefox2 using:

xhost +local:
sudo su firefox2
export DISPLAY=:0.0
firefox-2

The caution...using xhost +local: means any user logged onto your box (i.e. local), including ssh sessions, can access your X session. You will not have your bookmarks etc., but you can make a copy of bookmarks.html from your ~/.mozilla/firefox/%default profile%/bookmarks.html. You can now install the conventional FF add-ons etc.

This should be treated as a hack and an interim measure, because once FF3 is supported by all your favourite extensions, then there is no need to carry on using it. I use my FF3 as my primary browser, and FF2 as a development environ (so not having bookmarks is fine for me, because I literally only use it for opening the site I am currently working on).

Would appreciate constructive comments and crit. of better ways of doing this.