browser addons - Running Multiple Instances of Firefox

07
2014-07

Aaron Bush

I am running SysInternal's Desktops 1.02 and FireFox 3.6.2. I have noticed that while I can have Internet Explorer 8 open in multiple virtual desktops, you can not do the same with Firefox. If you try you get the error message:

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.

I did a little digging around to work around this and came up with creating a second profile via the Firefox profile manager (accessed by starting Firefox with the "-p" switch). This unfortunately created a new problem which is my add-ons (of which I use many) do not stay synchronized between profiles.

Is there a better approach here?

Answers

njd

With the Sysinternals utility, Firefox on another desktop runs as a different process, just as if you had run it as:

firefox.exe -no-remote

(That usage will also complain if you try to use the same profile twice, even if you're not running Desktops).

It looks like Firefox is using Windows messages to determine whether there's already a Firefox instance running, and doesn't find anything on the same desktop, so starts a new instance.

And this is why you can't use the same profile.

I'm guessing that IE8 works differently (possibly because it uses multiple processes anyway) and uses some communication mechanism that works across multiple desktops.
IE8 probably co-ordinates all access to user (profile) data through a single process; Firefox doesn't, so it will prevent multiple processes using the same profile to avoid the possibility of file corruption.

Alternative

VirtuaWin, available free from Sourceforge, does essentially the same job, and works the way you'd expect with Firefox - multiple Firefox windows across various desktops, all from the same Firefox instance with the same profile.

hvtuananh

Run firefox -ProfileManager to create a new profile, say test (Note that all Firefox windows must be closed before run this command)
Run firefox -P test -no-remote to run another instance of Firefox with the newly created profile

James

I haven't tried this, but maybe you could could copy and rename your main profile (as many times as you want), then run extra instances of Firefox using these new-but-identical profiles. (Just remember to save any new bookmarks in your original profile or thing could get confusing.)

Xolve

Simple solution is to open task manager and kill(end) the firefox process. Next time you fire up firefox you will find recovery tab and you can start from there.

Iceberg

The answer by hvtuananh still works today on Win 7 for me (using MS:Desktops). I added a second profile in ProfileManager (called second_user) and also unchecked the box to always use the selected profile at startup. Then on FF Properties I added the arg "-no-remote". I can get multiple instances of FF now. There's still a problem though - they all open on my first virtual desktop even though I was on my 4th virtual desktop when I clicked my QuickLaunch bar icon for FF. (Yes, I added it back.)

The fix for that is this: I went back to my 4th virtual desktop, launched a command line window, cd'd to the firefox directory (C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox)(don't really need to do that when the path to FF is in the system path environment variable), and launched it from there with a command line command (firefox -P second_user). This time the FF window opened on my 4th virtual window. Done. Mischief managed.

Related Question

windows 7 - Firefox 3.5.6 causes entire computer to freeze

windows-7 firefox browser-addons crash

Anthony Aziz

Here's the situation:

Environment:

Just installed a fresh copy of Win7 Pro 32-bit to NTFS partition on 750GB SATA drive
Hardware:
- E8400 3GHz
- ASUS P5QL Pro
- 4GB DDR2 1066 RAM
- EVGA 9800 GTX+
- Plenty of cooling, no problems with hardware before
Data is stored on a separate partition, including My Documents
No security software is yet installed
No extensions installed yet

Problem:

While using Firefox, sometimes the entire computer will freeze/hang. I get no mouse or keyboard input, can't CTRL+ALT+DEL, no "not responding" indication, just a static image on my display. My drivers are all up to date as far as I'm aware (I just installed this copy of Windows last week). I first noticed this when trying to install Xmarks. I went to the Xmarks site and tried to install and it would freeze. I managed to get it installed (Safe mode and the Mozilla addon site worked), but when I go to configure it (log in, etc), the computer freezes.

I don't think it's a matter of usage time or memory issues, because while testing, I browsed wallpaper galleries for about 30 minutes, sometimes as many as 12-15 tabs open at a time, without issue. Sometimes I won't even try to install Xmarks at it will hang. I can install (some) other extensions, the only one I've tried is download status bar (which works).

What I've done to try to fix:

Restarted (duh)
Windows safe mode
Completely remove Firefox and install it to a new directory, according to Mozilla's KB (I haven't tried the profile manager, though I assume this does the same thing, except perhaps more thoroughly)
Some BIOS changes, including Power options, disabling oveclocking (it was a modest overclock on the CPU, which has run Win7 beta and RC for almost a year now)
Memtest
Used another Windows user profile, same tragic results

I'm STUCK now, with no idea what to do. I'm using Chrome as my main browser at the moment, but that's not something I want to be stuck with. I like Firefox and want to use it. I'm going to try creating a new profile first.

One thing I did notice: I started leaving task manager and performance monitor open when anticipating (but dreading) a freeze. firefox.exe had low CPU and low memory, but it looked like overall disk usage was seeing some spikes on the small graph Performance Monitor gives you. I saw on one blog post a fellow using XP moved his Local Settings directory from a separate drive to his main drive, and that solved it, but I don't think my AppData directory is on my D: drive, and that's on the same physical device anyways. Still, something that might be worth trying.

I'd extremely appreciate any help. Thanks very much. I really don't want to reinstall Windows from scratch again :(

Anthony Aziz

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browser addons - Running Multiple Instances of Firefox

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