I have installed this addon https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/switchy/
and i am able to run two profiles in the same time with it and i have also set "false" for AllowMultipleInstances.
Why when i use the addon i am able to run two profiles and two instances of firefox in the same time, but when i use the second profile from portableapps https://portableapps.com/support/firefox_portable#second_profile
it shows that another instnce of firefox is running when i try to launch the second profile?
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Firefox itself is designed to only run a single profile at a time. This is a design choice by the development team. You can bypass this using the -no-remote switch (utilized by AllowMultipleInstances setting in our launcher) but there are caveats with it. Firefox won't know which running instance of firefox.exe to send a passed URL to, so file associations won't work with it. And our launcher won't be able to clean up properly once it closes.
If this extension bypasses the restriction on running multiple profiles that Firefox has built in, it will likely cause other issues within Firefox as it's doing something it wasn't designed for.
Either way, the restriction is not ours, it is Firefox's.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
So, is it recommended to use this addon with portable Firefox or not?
As I have no idea how the add-on works nor how/why it is bypassing Firefox's built-in mechanism to prevent multiple profiles from running, you're on your own here.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
This addon won't work with portable as portable looks for profiles.ini in the userAppDirectory. Portable doesn't update userAppDirectory so it looks for ini in the userAppDirectory as if firefox was non-portable. So profile manager will find 0 profiles when it starts up.
You have to use the addon Profilist, but portable will be supported for that in its next version.
The addon author is working on supportng it right now, if you are availalbe you can help test it out. Everything works except identifying if it's portable or not, so a sepearte version of the addon exists right now for portable users.
Or you can use the portableApps 2nd profile aplication, but that involves installing it to different directories and you cant switch to them from within a profile.
From what i am seeing so far the addon is working. I have created two profile: Default and Test. In FirefoxPortable.ini i have set the path to my default profile ProfileDirectory=Data\profile\Default. The Test profile i am launching from the addon and from what i am seeing so far firefox is saving the settings for the both profiles correctly.
Are you talking about this addon https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profilist/.
It seems it is not compatible with firefox 28. I will install it when i upgrade to firefox 29.
Thanks very much for sharing that info on FirefoxPortable.ini I didn't know that it worked out of there, I'll make my portable version work from there too.
Yeah proiflist is the one but it won't work on portable. I'm making a ProfilistPortable now though, which is just some changes to the main one. I'll upload it to AMO soon.