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by aggronn 2069 days ago
I'm also doing this in chrome. I have about 5 different profiles, aliased to things like `chrome-work`, `chrome-personal`, `chrome-dev', etc. I would love to use FF, but iirc FF doesn't provide something like `firefox --profile=someIdentifier` that opens a new window in my desired profile.

edit: Apparently this is bad info. I'll have to give it a try again.
3 comments
satya71 2069 days ago
It does. `firefox -no-remote -P <profile>`
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tzs 2069 days ago
There's also a firefox-bin. Anyone know what the difference between firefox and firefox-bin is nowadays?

I believe that in the far past firefox-bin was the firefox binary, and firefox was a shell script that would do things like notice you already have a firefox-bin instance open and signal it to open a new window rather than launching a new firefox-bin instance.

But nowadays, firefox and firefox-bin seem almost the same. On the current release version on Mac, for example, both are binaries, with firefox-bin 40320 bytes and firefox just 16 bytes bigger.

Info.plist in /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents gives firefox is the executable to run. I'm not sure what role firefox-bin has now, if any.

Grabbing the source and building it myself results in firefox and firefox-bin matching.

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daleharvey 2069 days ago
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=658850 has some background, it seems at least sometimes they are identical
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codethief 2069 days ago
I used to always include `--no-remote` here but it seems `firefox -P <profile>` now works, too, even when another Firefox instance is already running. Is anyone experiencing the same?
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quesera 2068 days ago
When I last tested, it varied by platform.

Linux was happy to open a new instance without the `--new-instance` option (which is implied by `--no-remote`), but macOS required it.

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utucuro 2068 days ago
If you're already in FF, consider using about:profiles as well, the old profile manager GUI was integrated into the browser itself a while ago.
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WorldMaker 2068 days ago
Or a shortcut with `firefox --no-remote -ProfileManager` to always launch the profile dialog on bootup just like it is 90s Netscape all over again.
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codethief 2069 days ago
`firefox -P <profile name>` works like a charm for me?
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