User:Madamezou/ProfilesHowTo

How to use different versions and profiles of Firefox on Windows and Linux.

Windows

The following has been tested on Windows 7, but it should be pretty similar in other Windows versions.

How to install and run different Firefox versions

You may want to have different versions of Firefox on the same computer, in order to be able to reproduce bugs on the different versions, or on the different nightlies.

First of all, you'll have to download the version you want: here's the latest Nightly, latest Aurora, latest Beta. For other versions of Nightly, check out this page.

(TBD: add an explanation for the structure of the page, and find a stable url for the latest beta or add how to find the latest beta)

You'll want to download the .zip file associated to your operating system (Windows) and architecture (32 or 64 bit). If there's only a 32bit version you can safely download that even if you are on 64bit: it will work anyway.

Tell Windows that you want to save the file (TBD: screenshot). When the download is finished, unzip the archive (TBD more detailed?) in a new directory. For instance in (TBD: example path).

To launch it, press "WindowsKey+R", enter the path of the file and the commandline arguments, this way: <path-to-file> -no-remote -P. (screenshot)

The -no-remote argument will allow multiple copies of the application to run at one time. The -P argument will launch the profile manager and let you create, delete, rename or choose a profile. There are also other command line options.

How to manage profiles

As said above, the -P option will launch the profile manager. You can decide to create a new profile, delete an existing one, rename an existing one or to directly launch Firefox using a specific profile.

If you already know which profiles you want to use, you can directly launch it using the -p <profilename> option: <path-to-file> -no-remote -p <profilename> (TBD screenshot?)

(TBD a note about the importance of profiles in triaging/verification?)