Hello
I am on a DellE6230 running xenial64. I would like to run two installs of mike walshes_portable firefox. Not necessarily at the same time but on the same operating system. Is this possible and how .
At the moment I have two installs of xenial64 on the hdd. Both have firefox portable but one is set remembers history, the other does not. The second does not remember history so I can accept all cookies and they and the history are deleted at close. Any way to run two and not have to reboot os. Cookies are driving me mad.
Help appreciated.
Thanks
number77

@number77

Would Firefox profiles work for you?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pr ... cale=en-US

d-pupp wrote: ↑Tue Feb 20, 2024 7:30 pm

@number77

Would Firefox profiles work for you?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pr ... cale=en-US

I have looked at profiles and quite honestly they are too complicated for me. I need something simple like Firefox 1 and Firefox 2 if possible.

Is it firefox-portable from mikewalsh here: viewtopic.php?p=37559#p37559 ?
I'd say simply extract Firefox-portable64.tar.xz in two different locations , run LAUNCH on both and configure differently as you prefer (the settings, configurations (in "profile" folder) are portable too).

Couple of ways:
The easiest is to run one firefox and one firefox-esr. The reason it's the easiest is that both /usr/share/applications/firefox and the Name= argument in that file are already different from those employed by firefox-esr.

The above reveals what you need to do to run two instances of just firefox (or firefox-esr).

Mike's Menu-Add scripts (which is executed in order to create functioning menu entries) reads:
#!/bin/sh
#

Add Menu Entry...

#
HERE="$(dirname "$(readlink -f "$0")")"
APP=firefox
#
ln -s $HERE/LAUNCH /usr/bin/$APP
cp $HERE/DATA/$APP-portable.desktop /usr/share/applications/$APP-portable.desktop
cp $HERE/DATA/$APP.png /usr/share/pixmaps/$APP.png
#
fixmenus
sleep 1
#
jwm -restart

LAUNCH is symlinked at /usr/bin with the name 'firefox', the firefox 'desktop' file copied from /xxx/...firefox/DATA to /usr/share/applications, with the firefox pixmap file copied to /usr/share/pixmaps. Executing Menu-Add from a 2nd portable will overwrite the first.

The work-around is to edit App=firefox in your 2nd portable to, say App=firefox2; and edit the desktop file in /xxx/...firefox/DATA so that Exec=/usr/bin/firefox2. It wouldn't hurt if your also substituted a different icon for the one in /DATA, gave it a different name (e.g. firefox2) and edited the desktop's Icon= argument to employ that different name.

@number77 :-

Yes, you should be able to run 2 separate instances of Firefox-portable. Each one will be completely self-contained; however, I'm not entirely certain you could run both at the same time. Certainly, if you run one Firefox-portable, and one Firefox-portable-ESR, you ought not to have any issues; I've currently got both running alongside each other ATM, so.....

AFAIK, Firefox somehow recognises that it's running 2 of the same type simultaneously, and tends to complain about this. Normal Firefox and Firefox-ESR, however, seem to count as two different browsers? (No, I've never understood this one myself, so you're not alone in this respect!)

Mike.

An alternative option would be to use the browser as a SFS.

This could be loaded/unloaded as and when required.

Back @mikewalsh, hope everything is equal again

Jasper wrote: ↑Wed Feb 21, 2024 7:10 am

An alternative option would be to use the browser as a SFS.

This could be loaded/unloaded as and when required.

@Jasper :-

I see this mentioned a lot. It's not a good idea in the case of any of the 'zilla-based browsers, because they do have a built-in update mechanism.......and by turning the browser into a read-only package, you're immediately negating the advantage these browsers have of updating "in-situ"..!

This is one reason why the 'portable' browser concept works so well for us ever since we got the bugs ironed-out (all credit to @fredx181 for the initial idea a few years ago. I doubt he had any idea quite how far I'd run with it! ) The whole thing sits outside the save, and really doesn't have anything to do with your Puppy at all. Because it's separate, there's nothing keeping it from running the updater mechanism whenever it's launched; I know I'm a proponent - just like @bigpup - of "if it works, leave it alone", but where browsers are concerned, I WILL go out of my way to keep 'em up-to-date, since the internet is the biggest attack vector there is!

Mike.

The second does not remember history so I can accept all cookies and they and the history are deleted at close.

A SFS would be fulfil this requirement.

mikeslr wrote: ↑Wed Feb 21, 2024 12:44 am

Couple of ways:

That worked perfectly, one Firefox and one FirefoxESR, does exactly what I wanted. Thanks

It is solved now so thank you everyone for all the help and thank you once more mikewalsh for the portables.

Jasper wrote: ↑Wed Feb 21, 2024 2:35 pm

The second does not remember history so I can accept all cookies and they and the history are deleted at close.

A SFS would be fulfil this requirement.

I load a sfs of chromium into /tmp for this exact purpose, and it works well for me. With chromium, I can specify in my startup script where the cache and configs will be located when the sfs is loaded with
--user-data-dir=/your/preferred/path
and
--disk-cache-dir=/your/preferred/path

thus making sure they will not overwrite any configs or bookmarks kept in my save.
Does firefox allow for something similar?

@number77
I also keep a seprate bookmarks file I can use anywhere